Later that day Donald was buried at the International Cemetery. ‘I spent nearly seven months with him, visiting him twice daily and latterly I slept at the hospital,’ Ida du Mars wrote to Muriel. ‘Except for a special nurse I was alone with him when he passed away.’
‘Hank’ Sperry, now married to Ansie Lee, was one of Donald’s last visitors. After discussing his book project with Mayling during one of her visits, Donald had decided – for the second time – that his life story should remain unwritten to avoid embarrassing the Chiangs and hurting other people. He tried to cancel his agreement with Earl Selle and wrote to friends and members of his family withdrawing permission for them to speak to the writer. He also retrieved as many of his personal papers as he could locate. ‘On his deathbed in Shanghai,’ Sperry later said, ‘he asked me to burn those he still had and I did so.’ Thus the life of ‘Donald of China’ went up in smoke in a Shanghai fireplace.
Less than ten years later Mayling Soong Chiang was asked about Donald at a private dinner party at Chiang Kai-shek’s home in Taiwan. It was the spring of March 1955 and her guests were Denis Warner and his wife Peggy and Sir Wilfred and Lady Kent Hughes. Donald? Oh yes, Mayling said, he was ‘a funny little man’.
Denis Warner was a respected foreign correspondent for the Melbourne Herald Group. Well aware of Donald’s Olympian reputation among his peers, he pressed Mayling for an explanation. She scoffed at the suggestion that Donald had been her husband’s adviser and said he had worked in Chungking in some minor capacity. He was, she said, ‘someone of absolutely no consequence’.
The reason for Mayling’s attitude towards her long-time adviser and the man she called ‘Gran’ wasn’t hard to divine. Her popularity on the world stage, especially in the United States, had plummeted after Donald withdrew his careful guiding hand and left Chungking. Then in 1948, just as the Chiang regime was collapsing, Earl Selle’s book Donald of China appeared with its unquestioning hero-worship of Donald. As Donald had feared, the book presented the Chiangs as bit players in a great drama in which W. H. Donald was producer, director and star performer.
Mayling would have read the book, plus the numerous obituaries in which Donald was hailed as a hugely significant figure in the history of the Chinese Republic, a man who exercised enormous influence on Chiang Kai-shek and herself. The easiest way to kill questions about his role was to dismiss him as ‘a man of no consequence’.
It was also partly true. The tragedy of W. H. Donald was that he had played no part in the events culminating in Japan’s defeat. With his plain-talking, down-to-earth approach and vast experience of Chinese affairs, he would have been the perfect man to intercede in the highly personal clashes between Chiang Kai-shek and his irascible American chief of staff, General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, that had crippled much of China’s war effort.
Typical of Stilwell’s venom was his description of Chiang as ‘a grasping, bigoted, ungrateful little rattlesnake’. Donald might have agreed with these sentiments but, realising the importance of the Sino-American pact, would have hammered out a working relationship between them. As things were, James McHugh sided with the Chiangs and put the knife into Stilwell in letters to Washington. On Chiang’s insistence, Vinegar Joe was recalled to the United States.
Languishing in a Japanese internment camp during those tumultuous years, Bill Donald was indeed ‘a man of no consequence’ to Chiang Kai-shek and his wife. His terminal illness then cruelly robbed him of a second chance to get back into the game for the final showdown between Chiang and Mao Tse-tung.
Donald’s rightful place is beside George Morrison as the two most influential Australians in modern Chinese history. Like Morrison, his record wasn’t perfect but he set a standard for honesty and decency that was hard to beat. ‘Australia can be proud of Donald who served as a better Ambassador of Goodwill than could have any career diplomat,’ the China Press wrote in an editorial. ‘For in his every word, in his every deed, Donald showed the marks of the tradition of democracy which has made Australia what she is today. Yet Donald was more than an Australian, more than a man of “European” background. He was something far greater, far finer – a citizen of the world.’
There seemed to be no justice. On 24 October 1945 the Aust- ralian Crown Solicitor, H. F. E. ‘Fred’ Whitlam, father of the future prime minister Gough Whitlam, decided there was insufficient evidence to charge Alan Raymond or Wynette McDonald with treason. Captain Wilfred Blacket, a Sydney barrister serving with the Australian Security Service, was ordered to interview all three collaborators to extract more information.
On 10 November 1945 Blacket flew out of Sydney and six days later stepped off a plane in Tokyo. On the orders of Brigadier-General Elliott R. Thorpe, chief of counter- intelligence at MacArthur’s headquarters, John Holland had been arrested at gunpoint by three of Thorpe’s officers at Sapporo on the north island of Japan. The Americans found him sitting in a barber’s chair at the Grand Hotel while one girl shaved him and another manicured his nails. They believed his plan was to escape to Manchuria.23
Holland was flown to the war criminal stockade at Yokohama and then confined in Sugamo Prison where many Japanese war criminals were under lock and key. After interviewing him and reading Thorpe’s dossier – which included a signed statement from Holland admitting he had worked for the Japanese – Blacket concluded there was a prima facie case of treason against him.
Meanwhile, Wynette McDonald turned up at the Australian Legation in Shanghai demanding financial assistance. The legation occupied two large rooms in the consulate-general’s office in Avenue Joffre. There was a queue of people waiting in the drab corridor to be seen but McDonald and two of her lovers pushed passed them into the office of Henry Stokes. ‘I put the lovers out of court,’ Stokes related, ‘and was very blackbrowed with the wide and innocent eyed Miss McDonald.’ McDonald brassily told him she had had 100 lovers ‘but says that No 67, the Japanese guard when she was in the jug, was the only one she really loved’.
After she had left, Stokes ‘applied to have the harlot incarcerated immediately’ so that Blacket would arrive ‘to find the gentry all detained for questioning, including Raymond and McDonald’. But as Britain and the United States had given up their extraterritorial rights, the Chinese authorities refused to co-operate with Stokes and the pair were still free when Blacket flew into Shanghai.
When Blacket tracked them down, they admitted having been members of the Independent Australia League and making radio broadcasts for the Japanese. Raymond was unrepentant. He said that at no time was he under any form of compulsion and nor had he been paid for his services: he had worked for the Japanese because he believed Australia should be free of its imperial bonds. He expressed a desire to return to Australia but was most anxious that nothing should interfere with a psychology course he was taking at St John’s University.24
At his home in Frenchtown on 5 December, he handed Blacket a signed statement in which he claimed he had ‘made the decision to sacrifice myself if necessary’ for the benefit of Australia.
After the fall of Singapore the outlook for Australia was indeed black [he wrote]. I did not broadcast until after that time. Myself and a group of friends decided that if we could get Australia to declare independence she could not only take care of her own dire situation in a more realistic manner, but could also prepare for a better future. Accordingly we formed the Independent Australia League . . . I admit that I have worked constantly to lessen the effects of the war on Australia [and] I have always prayed that the Allies would win the war and that Australia would be safe.
At 9.45 am the following day Captain Blacket interviewed Wynette McDonald at 585 Yu Yuen Road, where she was living with her current lover, 24-year-old Carlos Henrique de Rosa Ozorio, a British subject of Portuguese extraction who had also been interned at Longhwa camp.
By the most twisted of logic, McDonald told Blacket that her broadcasts we
re actually an attempt to assist the Allied war effort. ‘I at no period had intended to co-operate with them,’ she said, ‘but had walked in fear of the Bridge House.’ She had found a Japanese travel book, which contained information that might be of use to the Nationalist regime in Chungking. She asked for permission to broadcast a program called ‘Japan and the Japanese’ in order to disseminate this information, but was ‘caught out’ when the Japanese told her she would have to make a political broadcast as well. She agreed to do so, and her lover Olof Lindquist wrote a political commentary for her – presumably the one about John Curtin and Joe Lyons.
McDonald admitted she had broadcast material that was abusive to the Allies and of assistance to Japan, but insisted her intention all along was to help Australia. ‘I am of the opinion,’ Blacket concluded, ‘that there is not sufficient evidence obtainable to warrant the laying of a charge of treason against McDonald.’
McDonald also told Blacket that Alan Raymond was ‘on a good thing with the Japs – they set him up in a tea business’. She added she was prepared to give evidence against him. His stepmother was contacted and also agreed to testify against him in exchange for a berth in a repatriation ship back to Australia. Blacket asked the Chinese authorities to arrest Raymond and McDonald but once again they refused to take orders from a foreign officer.25
Back in Canberra, lawyers studied the statements made by Raymond and McDonald and concluded there was little chance of getting a conviction on a charge of treason. In Raymond’s case, there was ‘little doubt he was guilty of treason but there was not sufficient evidence to support an indictment’.
Meanwhile, Wynette McDonald returned to Australia in the SS Bonaventure and moved in with her sister in Melbourne. From Chungking on 13 April 1946, the new Australian minister to China, Sir Douglas Copland, cabled Canberra demanding to know why ‘this notorious collaborationist’ had not been taken into custody on arrival in Australia, thus increasing ‘criticism in Shanghai that we are not planning to take action against such persons’.
In fact, there was evidence aplenty against Alan Raymond back at Sugamo Prison where, on 20 March 1946, Japanese spy chief Ikushima Kichizo revealed under interrogation that the Australian had served as a paid employee of Japanese naval intelligence in Shanghai.26 The Australian Legation in Washington followed this up in a message to the Department of External Affairs on 19 April 1946 which actually named Raymond as a Japanese agent:
The Military Intelligence Service of the [United States] War Department have asked us to transmit to you for information and appropriate action the following extract from a report forwarded from JICA [the Joint Intelligence Collecting Agency], Shanghai:
Report no. R-5005-CH-45: The following list of foreign agents of the Japanese, formerly active in Shanghai, has been submitted to General Dai Li [head of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret service]27 as of primary importance:
Pat Kelly, alias Frankie Johnston, British;
Alan Raymond, Australian.
On 20 May 1946 Fred Whitlam wrote to the Department of External Affairs that ‘it seems to me that the best course to adopt would be to give all possible assistance to the Chinese to have Raymond arrested and tried under Chinese law’. But the Nationalist regime took no action against him. Raymond’s identification as ‘an agent of primary importance’ was of little concern to Dai Li, who was involved in a life-and-death struggle with Communist infiltrators. He did nothing.
One resident was so infuriated about Raymond he consulted British Intelligence at the British Consulate. ‘Although they have a complete dossier on his record during the war, they are powerless to bring him to book without the co-operation of the Chinese,’ he said in a statement to the Australian Security Service. ‘Any unilateral act on the part of the British in this matter would be regarded by the Chinese as an infringement of their sovereignty, a point upon which they are absurdly touchy at the present time.’
As Raymond had wished, he was permitted to continue his studies in psychology at St John’s University. He also got married, a fact that emerged when he applied for Australian passports for himself and his Chinese wife. His application was turned down. Wynette McDonald was permitted to leave Australia and astonishingly took a job with the United States Army. John Holland was brought back to Australia where he was freed without charge.
To former internees who had listened to the collaborators’ broadcasts and then endured abuse and incarceration at the hands of the Japanese, it seemed monstrously unfair. One resident who saw Raymond lunching at the Palace Hotel with Chinese friends said, ‘It is galling to think that this man, who did so much to assist the enemy, should still be enjoying a full measure of freedom.’
Chinese Red Army units rampaged over Manchuria, besieging the Nationalist forces in Mukden, Changchun and Chinchow. Fearing the emergence of a strong Communist China under Mao Tse-tung on Russia’s eastern borders, Stalin had sent military supplies to Chiang Kai-shek throughout the war. But in the summer of 1946, he suddenly dumped the untrust- worthy Chiang and handed the Communists 1226 field guns, 369 tanks, 300,000 rifles, 4836 machine-guns and 2300 vehicles, all of which had been seized from the Japanese.1
As the military pendulum swung heavily in Mao’s favour, James McHugh also changed tack. ‘The more I hear and see of this situation out here, the more I am inclined to think that we should pull out completely and let this civil war take place,’ he wrote in a letter to his wife. ‘It would unseat Chiang and T. V. and all of the other crooked politicians, all of whom are growing rich now on all that we have given China.’2
The Australian minister, Sir Douglas Copland, concurred. He informed Canberra that the Nationalists were ‘inefficient, corrupt and intractable, and seemed destined to lose China to the Communists’.3 Although Chiang had an advantage in numbers and weapons, the peasants believed it was the Communists who had actively resisted the Japanese. It was the peasants who would decide the outcome of the civil war and they overwhelmingly supported Mao Tse-tung.
General Marshall realised that the Communists were not merely ‘land reformers’, as they presented themselves to foreign diplomats and journalists, but full-blooded Leninists, and that his mission to unite two diametrically opposed forces was doomed to fail. When he was recalled to Washington, the United States ended its efforts at mediation. As Nationalist troops deserted en masse rather than fight the Red Army, Dr John Leighton Stuart, the academic who served as the last American ambassador to Chiang’s government in mainland China, could do little except report the collapse of the regime.
In October 1946 Captain Wilfred Blacket returned to Japan to gather further evidence from the Japanese that would enable a charge of treason to be brought against John Holland. But Holland had slipped the net. After visiting his family in Perth, he left Fremantle in the SS Tai Ping Yang bound for Norway via the United Kingdom. His Australian passport had expired, so he travelled on a seaman’s document of identity.
Through Scotland Yard, the Australian Security Service traced him to an address in England. The question then arose of whether he should be tried in a British court or returned to Australia under the Fugitive Offenders Act. The solicitor-general, Kenneth Bailey, sought the advice of the English director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew (who would gain international notoriety in 1960 over his decision to prosecute Penguin books for obscenity after it published Lady Chatterley’s Lover).
On 7 February 1947 he replied to Bailey that Holland could be charged in Britain under Defence Regulation 2A which dealt with ‘renegades who were not thought to be deserving of death, which is the only penalty for treason’. As Holland was a British subject and the offences had been committed in Shanghai and Tokyo, he did not foresee any jurisdictional difficulty and he had been supplied with enough evidence to obtain an arrest warrant.
On 18 February Holland was arrested aboard an oil tanker at Hull. When he appeared at the Old Bailey on 25 March, he
pleaded guilty before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, to engaging in subversive activities in China and Japan. ‘It was vanity which caused you to think that a person like yourself could have some influence on the policy of Australia,’ Goddard told him. ‘But what you did in lending yourself to the Japanese came back on you like a boomerang and landed you in this torture of hell in Japanese prisons for two and a half years.’ Holland was bound over in the sum of £10 to be of good behaviour for the next five years.
At the Old Bailey on 24 March Lord Goddard had sentenced Thomas John Ley, a former minister of justice in New South Wales, to be hanged for arranging the murder of a barman he wrongly suspected of having an affair with his mistress. Describing Goddard’s leniency towards John Holland as ‘surprising’, Theobald Mathew wrote in a letter to Kenneth Bailey, ‘Perhaps he felt that having sentenced an Australian ex-Minister of Justice to death on the previous day it was time that the Commonwealth had a break!’[1]
Bailey replied there was ‘a great deal of disappointment’ in Australia at Holland’s lenient sentence. ‘I think most people had a kind of uneasy feeling that perhaps British Courts were not disposed to treat collaboration with the Japanese with the same realism as they had displayed in dealing with the collaborators with the Germans.’
Wynette McDonald surprised everybody by returning from abroad with a new husband, Carlos Ozorio; she was also pregnant. On 22 July 1947 Frederick G. ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan, former commander of the 2/30th Battalion in the Battle of Malaya and now deputy director of the Commonwealth Investigation Service in Sydney, sent a secret memorandum to Canberra that McDonald had been under surveillance while in Australia in 1946 but ‘was permitted to leave Australia and proceed to employment with the United States Army and returned to Australia per the SS Haleakala en route to Melbourne on Saturday, 19 July 1947’.
Shanghai Fury Page 44