Donald then set sail on a month’s cruise in a schooner. When he returned to Tahiti, there was a telegram from Mayling urging him to go to a more accessible place or to find his way back to Hong Kong. Donald ignored that cable and several more like it but soon afterwards made an important decision: he would abandon his book because ‘I would have to do too much debunking and hurt too many people’.
The decision meant he had nothing to do and he found himself monitoring short-wave radio bulletins for news about the fighting in China and the ‘Washington conversations’ between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the Japanese envoys, which were supposed to settle matters between Japan and the United States. When Mayling cabled that she was planning a goodwill tour of America and wanted him on hand as her adviser, the pull was too strong. He cabled back, ‘I am returning.’11
In Shanghai, Gordon Bowden had been ordered to close down the Australian trade commission. At the same time, he was transferred from the Department of Trade to the Department of Foreign Affairs. The three Bowden children were sent to school in Sydney and Melbourne, and in September Gordon and Dorothy arrived in Singapore where he opened a new office in the Union Building at Collyer Quay, with Norman Wootton as commercial secretary and John Quinn as political secretary.12
‘As official representative of Australia at Singapore, V. G. Bowden will have high diplomatic status,’ The Argus reported. ‘Australia’s trade representation at Shanghai will cease and all the Commonwealth’s commercial relations with China will be controlled by Sir Frederic Eggleston, Australian minister for Chungking.’13
Indeed, Eggleston, lawyer, politician and head of the Commonwealth Grants Commission, had been knighted and sent to the wartime capital as Australia’s first minister to the Chinese Republic. Aged 66, he suffered from arthritis and gout and weighed 200 pounds. His huge bulk had to be carried everywhere in a sedan chair borne by four coolies rather than the usual two. Despite his immobility, he was remarkably successful in the post. At the Australian Legation, he opened a salon to which he invited a wide range of Chinese intellectuals and young scholars. Visiting journalists including Douglas Wilkie of the Melbourne Herald, Selwyn ‘Dan’ Speight of the Sydney Morning Herald and Wilfred Burchett of the Sydney Daily Telegraph and the London Daily Express were offered French wine from the well-stocked ambassadorial cellar while listening to his collection of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Schubert records.14
Burchett made trips to the fronts in Chekiang, Fukien and Kiangsi and reported on the fighting to Eggleston when he returned to Chungking. ‘Burchett is a most interesting and enterprising man and deserves a very high reputation as a war correspondent,’ the minister wrote in his diary. ‘He is always where the firing is.’15
Eggleston proved to be a natural diplomat capable of presenting Canberra with a shrewd analysis of the Chungking political scene. ‘The China I do see is interesting but not inspiring,’ he wrote to his friend Robert Menzies. ‘One or two heroic figures like Chiang, a few very fine minds, a lot of intriguing politicians and a mass downtrodden by landlords, moneylenders and profiteers, tolerating with smiling faces and full but undernourished bellies what could not stand for a moment with us.’16
Eggleston held weekly meetings with Archie Clark Kerr when he was in Chungking, dined with H. H. Kung and consulted Chou En-lai who ran the Communist office there until he left abruptly for Yenan to present Mao Tse-tung with an ultimatum from Chiang Kai-shek.17
Throughout the troubles, Viola Smith and Eleanor Hinder had been actively involved in their duties for the Municipal Council and the American Consulate respectively. Viola, who had been promoted to consul, took a leading role in the evacuation of American civilians from Shanghai. Then in October 1941 she left Shanghai on home leave expecting to be away four months. The separation affected Eleanor deeply. On 9 October she wrote:
Just 24 hours since the tender pulled out. They have been heavy hours. How devastation can invade and possess one while outwardly one is carrying on. I have a weight on my heart like the Dunkirk days, as if my body cannot contain the pressure that is within it. I was determined that you would leave me calm, that I would not make it harder for you than it was, that I would show no tears. But the effort at control can build up a suffering which is almost unbearable . . . By the time this can reach you, of course, this too will have passed, as other griefs have passed. So you can read it knowing that I will soon be alright.
Goodnight, my ownest one. How silent the house is!
My love, my dear dear one.
Your Bug.18
Meanwhile, Harold Timperley was on a lecture tour of Australia after spending that summer in Chungking. ‘The ruined and blackened areas of Chungking tell their own story today,’ he said in an interview with Geoffrey Hutton of The Argus.
In the spring of 1939 I was staying in a small hotel in Chungking. The hotel has gone now. A bank was built on its ruins. That has gone, too, and there is another building there . . . Summer is the bombing season in Chungking – in winter the mountains are covered in cloud and the Japanese do not risk a flight. So each summer the city is painfully destroyed and each winter it is rebuilt.19
Later that month Timperley was on his way from Australia to the United States when Bill Donald and Ansie Lee boarded his ship in Auckland. The two Australians were delighted to see one another. The meeting convinced Donald that fate was drawing him back to China. Timperley told him he had been in Canberra for the fall of the Fadden Government and had renewed his acquaintance with the new prime minister, John Curtin, ‘who was formerly a journalist colleague of mine in WA’.20
Donald and Ansie Lee left the ship at Honolulu and sailed for Hong Kong in the freighter SS Robert Dollar which was carrying arms and equipment for the Canadian expeditionary force that had been sent to protect Hong Kong after Britain turned down Chiang Kai-shek’s offer of Chinese troops. Before they sailed, Donald wrote to Harold Hochschild, ‘The heat of war is steaming up. Whether or not Japan will risk an encounter with America and Britain will be known in a week or so.’
On the night of 7–8 December 1941 the Japanese occupied The Bund – British troops had been evacuated to Hong Kong at Japanese insistence and there was nothing to stop them walking over Garden Bridge and taking possession of the rest of the International Settlement. The lone British gunboat on the Whangpoo, HMS Peterel, deprived of most of her guns following Japanese protests, was sunk by Japanese naval gunfire when her captain, Lieutenant-Commander Stephen Polkinghorn, refused to surrender.
Later that same morning the SS Robert Dollar was south of Ambon in the Dutch East Indies when the captain told Donald, ‘Pearl Harbor has just been bombed. There’s war with Japan.’ As reports came in of Japanese attacks on Malaya and Hong Kong, the Robert Dollar headed for Manila.
Shanghai awoke to the sight of Japanese soldiers setting up barricades and taking control of newspapers and radio stations. The office of the North-China Daily News was sealed and the paper shut down. Allied officials were corralled at Cathay Mansions, a British-owned residential hotel across the street from the French Club in Rue Cardinal Mercier.
When the Japanese tried to enter the Custom House, Captain Charles Woodfield of the Shanghai River Police barricaded the heavy bronze doors. Born in South Shields, County Durham, Woodfield had worked his way up in the municipal police from 1907 to 1923 when he transferred to the river police section of the customs service. ‘Uncle Bill was the last man in the building – he’d got everyone out in the old tradition of the captain being the last man on the ship,’ says his great-niece Elizabeth Fay Woodfield. ‘The Japanese broke in and as they were coming up the stairs, he hanged himself.’ It was a tragic end for a brave man who had devoted his life to protecting the people of Shanghai.21
After months of violent crime, many Europeans found compliance with the occupiers the easier option. The savage efficiency of the Japanese authorities in imposing their wi
ll was an important factor in the city’s comparative calm. On 9 December Viola Smith wrote to Eleanor Hinder from California:
Buggie, BUGGIE, DARLING!
The zero hour has struck. Flora [Gramber, a mutual friend] and I first heard it from a radio truck in the courtyard of the lovely Mission Inn at Riverside . . . We got only the barest details of attacks on Manila and Honolulu. We stood riveted in the spot. It seemed incredible that after 21 years of living on a tinder box in China that I should be in America, standing alongside Flora, and amidst all that the Mission Inn stands for. The anguish of the last 48 hours without any news or any possibility of getting news of you has been terrible . . . My heart aches for you darling darling mine but I can serve you best by trying to be reasonable. God keep you safe and grant that this letter reaches you.22
Always your devoted VEE.
Hubert ‘Hugh’ Collar, chairman of the British Residents’ Association, was halfway through lunch in the upstairs dining room at the Shanghai Club when there were muffled sounds of disturbance from below. ‘Ward, the club secretary, entered the dining room accompanied by a Japanese Naval Officer and two ratings armed to the teeth,’ he wrote. ‘Ward called for silence and announced in a very agitated voice that the Japanese had come to take over the club, and that the whole premises must be completely vacated in 20 minutes.’ Several resident members went up to their room to pack, while the remainder continued their meal, ‘and apart from a certain heightening in the level of conversation no one would have realised that the members were about to be submitted to the indignity of being turned out neck and crop from these sacrosanct premises’.23
The vast administrative building where Eleanor Hinder worked on the corner of Kiangsi and Foochow roads was occupied by Japanese personnel and guards were placed at the entrance. Along with all Australian, New Zealand, British, American, Belgian and Dutch citizens, she lined up on a wet, cold December morning to register with the Kempeitai at their new headquarters in nearby Hamilton House. The queue extended around the block and many people had to return several times before they could get in.
‘The Japanese appeared to enjoy our discomfort and took motion pictures of us waiting in line,’ Arch Carey of the Asiatic Petroleum Company wrote. ‘Most people turned their backs on the photographers [and] we all kept up a cheerful front.’24 Allied nationals were also required to bow and raise their hats whenever they passed one of the Japanese flags that had suddenly appeared over the entrances of many of the city’s most prominent buildings. Most solved that problem by leaving their hats at home and going bareheaded, despite the icy winds whistling down from Manchuria.
Inspector Roy Fernandez had sent his wife Sybil and children Roy Jr and Stephanie to Australia via Hong Kong in the Butterfield & Swire steamer SS Anhui on 6 December. As soon as war was declared, the captain was ordered to head for the nearest port, which happened to be Manila. ‘Manila didn’t really want us,’ his daughter Stephanie says. ‘We were left out in the bay being bombed. The Red Cross took us in and we were sent from place to place.’ When the Japanese took over Manila, Sybil and her two children were interned in a camp at Sulphur Springs in the hills outside the capital.25
Meanwhile, Colin McDonald had been steadfastly reporting the war for The Times. He was in Hong Kong when it surrendered to the Japanese on Christmas Day 1941 and ran the Japanese blockade to cable his dispatch to his newspaper. He filed 500-word reports every day not knowing whether they would reach their destination owing to frequent disruption of the telegraphic service.26
Bill Donald and Ansie Lee reached Manila just as General Douglas MacArthur declared it an open city and withdrew his troops to the Bataan Peninsula to make a last desperate stand. In a press interview, Donald revealed that Britain had secretly turned down Chiang’s offer to protect Hong Kong with 200,000 Chinese troops. The British declined the offer, he said, because they feared acceptance would offend Japan.27
George Morrison’s eldest son, Ian, was working for Rob Scott at the Ministry of Information in Singapore. He and his Czech-born wife Maria were asleep in their flat when the city was bombed for the first time. He dashed on to the balcony and saw searchlights probing the skies and heard the drone of Japanese bombers and the sound of explosions from the docks and the city centre.
Gordon Bowden joined the Far East War Council as Australia’s representative under the chairmanship of Churchill’s emissary Duff Cooper. At the first meeting, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief Far East, and the Governor of Singapore, Sir Shenton Thomas, made it plain they had no intention of taking orders from Cooper. Bowden’s cables warned Canberra of the looming disaster, but as the Japanese advanced down the Malay Peninsula, there was nothing he could do to prevent the council from lapsing into impotence. Cooper proved incapable of overcoming the opposition and fled back to England at the earliest opportunity.
Ian Morrison escaped in one of the last freighters to leave Singapore and made his way to Melbourne where he wrote a scathing account of Britain’s greatest military catastrophe in a book entitled Malayan Postscript. Gordon Bowden, Norman Wootton and John Quinn, however, were told to hold on in Singapore until the very last minute. ‘The department ordered my father, Wootton and Quinn to stay,’ Ivor Bowden says. ‘It was a question of face and they also wanted the latest reports. But my father cabled my mother that he would have sent Wootton and Quinn away and stayed himself but they refused to leave without him.’28
Gordon Bowden’s final cable said, ‘Our work completed. We will telegraph from another place at present unknown.’ The message was transmitted on a small handset located at the point where the cable entered the water. In the early hours of 15 February, Bowden and his two colleagues left Singapore in the motor launch Mary Rose, which ran into the Japanese Navy at the entrance to Banka Strait. The men were taken to Muntok Harbour, where Bowden was involved in an altercation with a Japanese guard. He was led outside and half an hour later two shots were heard. Gordon Bowden had been forced to dig his own grave and was then executed.
‘It could well have been my father’s knowledge of Japanese that cost him his life,’ Ivor Bowden says. ‘One of the soldiers tried to remove his gold watch and he remonstrated with him. He had also been told to state that he was a member of the diplomatic corps and that he had immunity. He probably demanded to speak to the soldier’s commanding officer and that was the last thing the soldier wanted. He would have thought my father was going to complain about the watch, so he killed him.’29
To celebrate the fall of Singapore, Wynette McDonald drove along The Bund in an open-top car with a Japanese naval officer in a Japanese victory parade, an act that brought universal condemnation from the city’s Anglo-Australian community. Then on the evening of 7 March she joined Alan Raymond and the former Australian arms dealer John Holland at a ‘Break Away from Britain’ meeting in Room 106 of the Palace Hotel.30
At midnight on 11 March, Radio Berlin reported that an ‘Australian Independence Movement’ had been founded in Shanghai under the leadership of Alan Raymond. Raymond was quoted as saying that Australia should demand complete independence from Britain ‘in so far as she is able to determine her own destiny at the conclusion of the present conflict’. He would appeal to his fellow countrymen in radio broadcasts because ‘it looks as though Japan will win the war or force a peace on Australia’.
At the second meeting of the Independent Australia League Raymond told his followers (and Lieutenant Kazumaro Ueno, a member of the Japanese Army’s intelligence section who turned up to check the progress of the embryonic organisation), ‘Since the Japanese government has intimated its desire to save Australia from the horrors of war, the Commonwealth should negotiate for an honourable peace.’ The Shanghai Times reported under the headline ‘Australians urged to end pointless war’ that ‘the gathering has grown to twice the number of Australians who attended the first meeting’. Since there were eight Australians among the 11 pe
ople at the first meeting, this meant an increase to perhaps 16, although that figure was never substantiated. One of them was Jacqueline Valerie Everett, ‘a pleasant and capable personality’ who was described as the league’s social secretary. Indeed, it transpired that most of the members were more interested in social activities than getting involved in politics.31
Lieutenant Ueno suggested that the renegade Australians be given a three-hour daily program on Station XMHA entitled ‘Australia Calling’ and consisting of items urging Australians to withdraw from the war. ‘Should this program fail,’ he declared, ‘it is the intention of the Japanese authorities to contact all Australians in occupied areas and give them a chance to go with the Japanese to Australia and there run the administration.’32
Prior to the Japanese takeover, Station XMHA at 445 Racecourse Road had a proud record of resistance. Its star broadcaster was 40-year-old Carroll Alcott, a beefy American who broadcast three times a day on Asian matters. It was said Tokyo lost face every time he opened his mouth. Using a transmitter based in a room at the Astor House Hotel, the Japanese jammed his broadcasts, so Alcott opened his show by singing ‘Jell-O, Jell-O, Jell-O’, the name of a popular brand of jelly.
When the Japanese denied they were jamming him, he announced the room number of their operations. When they threatened his life, he bought a bullet-proof vest. After they tried to drag him out of a rickshaw, he drove to work in a Packard with bullet-proof glass and a couple of Russian bodyguards. He finally left Shanghai when the United States Marines were recalled to the Philippines prior to Pearl Harbor, donning a Marine uniform and marching out with them.33
Shanghai Fury Page 40