All this time, the United States armed forces were making their way closer to the sacred Home Islands of Japan. The names of Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were written into the annals of war in the blood and sacrifice of thousands of young men. Alan Raymond greeted the Allied advance with a sneer. In his broadcast on 11 April 1945, he said, ‘The American policy to send over greater numbers [of planes] against Japan gives a welcome increase of the targets for the Japanese special attack units.’29 And on 20 July he assured listeners, ‘Despite the approaching battle, Shanghai continues as normal. In point of gaiety and excitement, there is no other community anywhere in the world like this.’30
At 08.15 on the morning of 6 August 1945 bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a four-tonne uranium device named Little Boy from an American B-29 aircraft over the south island of Japan. Forty-three seconds later the first atomic bomb exploded at a height of 305 metres above the courtyard of the Shima Hospital in the heart of Hiroshima with the force of 12,500 tonnes of TNT. Around 70,000 people were vaporised in the first nuclear attack on a civilian population.
As Bill Donald had predicted, the Red Army then attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria. On 8 August Stalin’s legions fell upon the dispirited defenders with 70 divisions in a four-pronged offensive. The Japanese had anticipated this moment for eight years and when it came their 40 divisions were completely overwhelmed.
At 11.02 the following morning, 9 August, Fat Man, a plutonium bomb bigger than Little Boy, was dropped on the civilian port of Nagasaki, killing 50,000 people and injuring many thousands more. Ironically, it was the threat of a Russian invasion of the sacred homeland rather than the effects of two atom bombs that most terrified the Japanese hierarchy.
At midday on 15 August a Japanese radio announcer asked all listeners to stand ‘respectfully’ in front of their radio sets. The familiar strains of the Japanese anthem were played and then in a high-pitched, tremulous voice Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender.
The Pacific War – and more importantly to Donald and 400 million Chinese, the Sino-Japanese War – was over. While 200,000 Japanese prisoners of war were transported to Siberia, the American Air Force flew thousands of Nationalist troops to Shanghai, Nanking and Peking to take the surrender of the local garrisons and beat the Communists to vast dumps of Japanese arms.
Wilfred Burchett, the Australian war correspondent, arrived in Japan with General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation forces. At great personal risk, he joined a queue at Tokyo central station and took a train to Hiroshima. ‘I was the first non-Japanese person into Hiroshima,’ he said. He was also the first reporter to write about the ‘atomic plague’ that would kill thousands of Japanese from leukaemia and other forms of cancer.
Like many Old China Hands, Bill Donald was unforgiving. ‘I hope MacArthur has the determination to strip those little people of everything they possess that might help them to recover,’ he wrote to Bob Tierney. ‘I do not like the way in which they are hoping to retain their military machine. I want to see them be made to pay for their atrocities towards Americans, Filipinos, Spaniards, British and Chinese.’1
Roy Fernandez and his family had been moved to another camp in the Sacred Heart Chinese Hospital downriver at Yangtzepoo. ‘Our commandant got up and told us the Japanese would fight to the last man,’ Stephanie Fernandez says. ‘We woke up one morning to find they had disappeared and we were free.’2 Then a van with the Australian flag tied to both sides came trundling into the camp – the Australian Red Cross had got through the lines to deliver food. They also gave every woman in the camp a box containing soap, shampoo, talcum powder, lipstick, face powder, underwear, a nightdress and sanitary towels. ‘Someone in Australia had been really thoughtful,’ Stephanie says, ‘and I was a very proud young Australian.’3
While thousands of ecstatic Chinese citizens swarmed through the streets of the International Settlement, Lieutenant-General Chen Shu-sun of the Third Chungking Army took the Japanese surrender from the deputy chief of the Japanese 13th Army, Lieutenant-General Toji Minfu, at the Cathay Hotel.
Reviewing the status of Shanghai following the end of the loathsome extraterritorial privileges for foreigners, the War Minister General Ho Ying-shin announced, ‘Shanghai is now completely under Chinese sovereignty and no one, regardless of nationality, is to observe any law other than that of this country. No one is to have any privilege whatsoever.’4
The Nationalists restored the Shanghai Power Company to its American owners and the waterworks to the British, but the American-owned Shanghai Telephone Company was the subject of negotiations.
‘Although 8500 Allied internees in Shanghai have been freed, including Australians, the majority of them have no money and are homeless,’ Herbert Mishael reported in the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘They are compelled to stay in the internment camps until they can be reached by friends.’5 Keith Officer, the Australian chargé d’affaires, flew down from Chungking and set up a residential centre in a building in downtown Shanghai as a temporary home for 70 Australians. A large Australian flag was draped over the entrance of the ‘Southern Cross Club’ and Fred Drakeford, brother of the Australian Minister for Air Arthur Drakeford, was appointed manager.6
Major H. W. Jackson, who arrived in Shanghai with the 3rd Prisoner of War contact and inquiry unit, compiled nominal rolls of 240 Australian internees in the Shanghai area and interviewed many of them about their experiences. One of the saddest cases was Jean Armstrong, the journalist who had been beaten by ronin prior to internment. Now 53, Jean suffered badly from arthritis, anxiety and loss of memory. She described herself as a ‘woman who has gone through Hell’. ‘Can’t gather thoughts accurately but think I went into camp around 15 April 1942,’ she later wrote. ‘Doctors tried to keep me out of camp, said I was not fit to go in.’ Jean was initially interned at Lunghwa but was then admitted to the invalids’ camp at Columbia Country Club before being sent to Yangtzepoo. After being liberated, she was taken to an American hospital ship, then to the British Hospital in Shanghai, where she was interviewed by the investigating committee and signed a statement. ‘Formerly I was a worldly Australian citizen,’ she wrote to Henry Stokes, a member of the Australian Legation at Chungking who visited her at Yangtzepoo, ‘now I come to you “beaten & broke”.’
Internees were informed they would be sent by ship as soon as possible to Manila, where an Australian reception centre had been established. Fred Drakeford, however, flew out in a Catalina flying boat, courtesy of his ministerial brother. The plane also took Douglas Murdoch, a cousin of Sir Keith Murdoch, and his wife Joyce back to Australia.7
Murdoch, an engineer with Cable & Wireless in Hong Kong, was suspected of collaboration after accepting a Japanese offer to transfer from Stanley camp in Hong Kong to Shanghai where he and his wife were given an apartment at the Cathay Hotel. After the war, Murdoch claimed he had been ‘interrogated’ for six months because the Japanese believed he had diplomatic connections. Australian investigators concluded that he had flirted with the idea of collaboration but had changed his mind and was then interned at Yangchow internment camp.8
The former telephone supremo Harry Pringle had the satisfaction of seeing his torturers sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. In November 1945, he was reunited with his wife Isabella and two daughters Elizabeth and Eileen in Australia. For many years, he worked at Nicholson’s Music Store in George Street, Sydney, and retired to Canberra. He died in 1987 at the age of 84.
Peace negotiations between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung opened in Chungking on 28 August but had little effect in stopping clashes between the Communists and Chiang’s commanders. ‘If the Communists are ready to give up their arms, then we may hope for peace in China,’ Bill Donald said in an interview. ‘However, I can’t believe that they are ready; they will never be satisfied until they dominate China completely.’
On his way back to California, Donald developed fee
lings of impending doom. ‘When I came out of the camp, I had nothing and I thought I was lucky,’ he wrote to Muriel from Chicago. ‘Now I have accumulated two suitcases, one duffel bag and they are too much and I feel unlucky.’
On 25 October 1945 Donald sailed for New Zealand with the intention of stopping in Tahiti for a while and then travelling from New Zealand to Australia to see his family before finally heading north to China. ‘Be of good cheer,’ he counselled Muriel, ‘and don’t throw dirty water away till you can get clean. With warmest regards and affectionate wishes. As ever, with love, Dad.’9 Donald never saw his daughter again.
With the defeat of Japan, Chiang Kai-shek, pale-faced and almost bald, claimed in an interview in October 1945 to have all but united China with the exception of the Communists and, according to Herbert Mishael, ‘he has gone a long way towards achieving that in spite of almost insurmountable difficulties and differences’.10
In late December, General George C. Marshall, America’s brilliant wartime chief of staff, arrived in Shanghai as President Harry S. Truman’s special representative, ‘a midwife to deliver the peace child to China’.11 His mission was to arrange a truce between Communist and Nationalist forces and establish a coalition government with the objective of resisting Stalin’s attempts to take over Manchuria. Truman had little regard for Chiang Kai-shek or the Nationalist Government. He had met Mayling once and, according to Vice President Wallace, ‘did not like her’.
Mayling had returned to China from her extended stay in the United States in September. Eleanor Roosevelt issued this sting- ing verdict on her former guest: ‘She can talk beautifully about democracy, but she does not know how to live democracy.’12
Mayling threw herself into the negotiations between Marshall and her husband, interpreting at their meetings but also attempting to take control of the talks. On 10 January 1946 Marshall succeeded in negotiating a ceasefire which began to take effect three days later. By the 25th, there was no fighting in China for the first time in 18 years.
Meanwhile, Bill Donald had been taken ill in Tahiti and admitted to the French Hospital. A doctor told him one of his lungs had collapsed and his other lung was full of fluid. Donald cabled Mayling asking for help and a request for assistance was sent from the Headquarters of the Generalissimo to the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor. The Navy dispatched a flying boat to Tahiti which took Donald to Honolulu. He was admitted to the Aiea Naval Hospital where tests showed he was suffering from terminal lung cancer.
When he was allowed visitors, the first people through the door were reporters anxious for his views on the new drama unfolding in China. Donald was as outspoken as ever: America, he said, was playing into the hands of the Chinese Communists by making aid to China contingent on certain political and economic changes. ‘The Reds live from the land and since they have never been recipients of aid from anyone, including the Russians, their position is not affected,’ he said. ‘Since they have no intention of laying down their arms their strength may grow purely because the areas under Kuomintang will weaken.’13
To Muriel, he wrote on 22 February 1946, ‘I am still here, looking forward to going back to Shanghai to see how things are there. To tell you the truth I feel nothing. I never did feel anything in the way of sensation and I feel no more or less today.’
One of the reporters who interviewed him was Earl Albert Selle of the Honolulu Advertiser. Selle had worked in Shanghai in the 1930s and talked to Donald about old times and the characters they had known. Knowing he was dying of lung cancer, Donald decided to collaborate with Selle on his life story and paid him US$5000, which he could ill afford, to take over the work immediately.
Selle had had a mixed career in journalism, ranging from police reporter on the Seattle Star to news reporter on the Shanghai Evening Post under the editorship of Carl Crow, as well as working for brave John Powell on the China Weekly Review. He had also lectured in journalism at the University of Shanghai, worked as publicity director for the Democratic Party in Washington State and written movie scripts for RKO Pictures in Hollywood.
One of the difficulties the authors had to overcome was that Selle had gone blind during the war. He recorded interviews with Donald on a dictaphone and corresponded with some of Donald’s friends and family through his wife, then set about dictating the book, Donald of China, to a secretary.14 After four weeks of interviews, Bill Donald called a halt; he was too sick to continue. He cabled the Chiangs that he wanted to die in China, so in March they sent his old friend Hollington Tong to Hawaii to take him back to Shanghai in a Nationalist aircraft.
‘In Shanghai, we are going to grieve a lot before we are through the jungle,’ he wrote to Muriel. ‘But we shall get through some way or other.’ When his plane took off on the evening of 15 March, he was wearing a lei of Hawaiian flowers around his neck, a panama hat on his head and a broad smile on his face. Donald of China was going home.
It came as no surprise that Shanghai had changed. In this new postwar world, the warships of the United States Seventh Fleet rode at anchor on the Whangpoo. On The Bund, a wooden building bearing the sign ‘US Navy Hamburger Stand’ sat opposite the regal Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, now restored to its rightful owners. The moneychangers in Szechuen Road no longer based their rates on the pound sterling but on the American dollar. And at the Canidrome, previously the scene of greyhound races, spectators now queued up to watch American football games.15
Millions of Chinese had turned out to welcome Chiang Kai-shek when he returned to Shanghai from Chungking in early 1946. But his minions unleashed such a ruthless takeover of so-called ‘enemy property’ – much of which had been seized from its Chinese owners in the first place – that public opinion quickly turned against him. The Nationalists were dubbed ‘Chungking Man’ and, it was said, they were interested only in the ‘five zi’ – tiaozi (gold bars), fangzi (houses), nuzi (girls) chezi (cars) and guanzi (restaurants).16
Donald was admitted to the Country Hospital in Great Western Road. On 5 August 1946 he received a cable informing him that his house in Peking, although dilapidated, was still intact. He sent orders back for the house to be sold. His visitors included George Morrison’s middle son Alastair Morrison, now a captain in the British Army, and Harold Timperley, who was back in Shanghai working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Alastair recalled, ‘He was a frail and gentle man who could joke about the solemn way a group of doctors told him he had terminal lung cancer.’17
Reporters still consulted him. ‘If China has the wisdom of the Serpent – and I believe she has – she will become the leading industrial power in Asia in the next ten years,’ he told one.
Harold Timperley’s colleague at UNRRA, Ida du Mars, had known Donald since 1923. She took him for walks in the garden, to the movies, to H. H. Kung’s mansion for dinner and for drives in Chiang Kai-shek’s car.18 ‘They are very kind to me,’ Donald wrote to Harold Hochschild. ‘They allow me to buy nothing and anticipate all of my wants, even to the point of embarrassment.’19 Mayling visited him several times, once with George Marshall’s wife Katherine.
Donald made frantic efforts to put his affairs in order. He wrote to Muriel on 12 October 1946:
On October 9th there was sent to you from the sale of my Peking house the sum of US$16,000. As it is now very difficult in China to arrange for gold dollar exchange, I have had the entire amount sent directly to you in one lump sum. It is my wish that you accept US$10,000 of this amount for yourself and deposit the balance of the amount, ie US$6000, in my account with the National City Bank of New York, 22 William Street, New York City. I am still in hospital and now that the hot summer weather is past, I am very hopeful that I will regain some of the strength I lost during the terrifically hot weather. I spend most of my time either in bed or sitting in my armchair on the verandah. I have had several operations since I last wrote to you and on the whole everything is goin
g as well as can be expected.
With love to you and hoping that you are well.
As ever, Dad (W. H. Donald)
As the Shanghai nights drew in, the man known to the Japanese as ‘the evil spirit of China’ approached what he called ‘the bourne where none return’. He cried out for Mayling who set off for Shanghai from Nanking but her plane was delayed and it seemed she might not arrive in time. Ida du Mars was at his side as he listened anxiously for the sound of her footsteps in the hall. She entered the room with the words, ‘Gran, here’s your boss.’ She sat beside his bed, picked up the Bible and read the 23rd Psalm. His last words to her were, ‘We’ll meet again in the next world.’20
Donald’s last wish was to see Dean A. C. S. Trivett of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, who hurried to the hospital and offered prayers for his salvation. Dr James T. Cheng said Donald lost consciousness late that night, his breathing became laboured and ‘in about five minutes it was all over’.21
W. H. Donald died at 1.15 am on 9 November 1946 at the age of 71. The following day he lay in state in a coffin draped in the Chinese flag, with a cross of yellow and white chrysanthemums and a ribbon inscribed ‘In memory of an Old and Valued Friend – Generalissimo and Madame Chiang’.22
The mourners at his funeral included Mayling Soong Chiang, H. H. Kung, T. V. Soong, Lieutenant-General Claire Chennault and Harold Timperley. They heard Tao-fan Chang, chairman of the Central Cultural Movement, deliver the eulogy. ‘It has pleased the Almighty to give you eternal peace and rest in Paradise,’ he said. ‘We, your admiring Chinese friends, find some consolation in this thought. Nevertheless, we feel utterly desolate because our country has lost in you such a dear friend.’
Shanghai Fury Page 43