Fellow passengers told an investigator who met the ship in Melbourne that they ‘were of the opinion that Ozorio and McDonald were man and wife, and their conduct on the voyage was such as to strengthen this impression’.4 Carlos Ozorio was born at Swatow, China, on 1 February 1921 and had been one of McDonald’s lovers during the war. They were now living at her parents’ home in Alma Place, St Kilda, and Carlos was working as a radio technician with the Department of Civil Aviation at Essendon Airport.
‘This man avers that he was married to Wynette McDonald on the 3rd or 4th January 1943 at a small Chinese church outside Lung Hua [sic] Internment Camp,’ says a secret memorandum dated 23 September 1947 in the Commonwealth Investigations Service files.
The parties are living together as man and wife, and a child is expected in December. She does not hold a marriage certificate and, as she indicated that they will probably go through a form of marriage here, it might be taken as an indication that there was no consummation [sic]. It can now be stated that Miss McDonald is not engaged in any activity of a subversive nature. She spends most of her time at home and would appear to have adopted the role of housewife.
As the Red Army approached the Yangtze and rice riots broke out among the starving masses in Shanghai, Ian Morrison wrote in November 1948, ‘My own prediction is that the Communists are going to get the whole of China – and fairly soon. There is nothing to stop them. The question is not whether they are going to come out on top, but what sort of Communists they are going to be.’5
This was the question that exercised the Foreign Office, which feared for the future of British investment in China. The Communists, however, refused to speak to British diplomats or even recognise the existence of the British consul-general in Shanghai. Whitehall called in the British Secret Service and as a result Commander John Proud joined the staff of the British Consulate in early 1949.
John Charles Rookwood Proud had been born in Melbourne on 13 October 1907. He had enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserve in August 1939 and had served in Singapore in 1941–42. On his return to Australia he had run Section D, the military propaganda section of the Allied Intelligence Bureau.6
His sudden appearance in Shanghai in the once important but now defunct role of ‘land consul’ mystified the foreign community. Proud was in fact a secret agent who had been trained in London with other agents including the Russian spy Kim Philby. During training exercises on how to lose an enemy tail, both men could be seen dashing up and down escalators in Harrods department store in Knightsbridge.
Proud was described as a dark-haired man with a wry, sardonic sense of humour and a thin figure ‘which seemed to slide into a chair rather than sit’. His mission in Shanghai was to recruit spies for the British Secret Service and make contact with the Communists with a view to protecting British investments.7
The curious thing about John Proud was that he had been named in an Australian secret intelligence report on 18 October 1948 as ‘a suspect member of the Australian Communist Party’. R. Williams, the deputy director of security, noted that after being demobilised Proud had worked for the Daily Telegraph and had subsequently run the ‘Forum of the Air’ program on the ABC. ‘It is reported that Proud in the course of his duty did not lose an opportunity of placing a Communist Party speaker on this program,’ Williams wrote, adding, ‘It is thought that some interest should be paid to Proud’s activities overseas.’ Clearly, he had no idea about Proud’s war service in intelligence or his present role in the British Secret Service.8
Proud’s second wife Roberta was also ‘suspected to possess Communist sympathies’ after an informant reported a con- versation at a Sydney drinks party in February 1948. When Tommy Thompson, advertising manager of Frank Packer’s Women’s Weekly, commented that one of the guests was a Fascist, Roberta had replied she was ‘glad to meet someone after her own heart’. This was taken to the absurd length of meaning that she was a Communist and that ‘she was here to contact members of the Party and pass on information’. Such was the anti-Communist paranoia in postwar Australia, mirroring the extremist McCarthyist mindset in the United States.
Australia’s representatives in China also faced a daunting task in negotiating with either Nationalist or Communist regimes. The Minister for Immigration Arthur Calwell was quoted in the Shanghai press in March 1949 as saying there would be ‘no appeasement, no quota system for the admission of Asiatics’ to Australia. ‘No matter how violent the criticism, no matter how fierce and unrelenting the attack upon me personally may be,’ he said, ‘I am determined that the Flag of White Australia will not be lowered.’9
In advance of the Battle of Shanghai, the deciding battle in the ‘War of Liberation’, Mao Tse-tung sent hundreds of fifth columnists south to spread propaganda among the workers. Driven out of Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek arrived in Shanghai and announced, ‘We will fight to the end. There will be no surrender.’ Graham Jenkins, a handsome, quietly spoken Melbourne reporter who was covering the war for Reuters, escaped on the last plane out of the doomed Nationalist capital before it fell to the Communists. On 24 April 1949 he reported in a Reuters dispatch that Communist forces under General Lin Piao had crossed the Yangtze in several places. The cities of Soochow to the north of Shanghai and Kashing in the south were in Communist hands and the Red Army was heading for Shanghai itself.
This report appeared in the North-China Daily News and several other Shanghai newspapers the following morning. The news that the Communists were so close to Shanghai caused panic among Chinese civilians. The streets filled with crowds stockpiling rice, flour and tinned foods for the impending siege. Later that morning, Jenkins and George Vine, the Daily News’s British assistant editor who had been on duty the previous night, were arrested by Chiang’s secret police and the paper’s British owners, the Morriss family, were ordered to suspend publication of the newspaper.10
At police headquarters in a derelict building in Avenue Haig, Frenchtown, Colonel Yang demanded to know Jenkins’s sources among the Communists. The Australian refused to tell him. ‘I can sentence you to death under martial law,’ the colonel warned. Jenkins was a confident, strongly built man nicknamed ‘Gunboat’; he had no intention of being intimidated. ‘You do that,’ he replied. ‘I will,’ the colonel shouted and told Jenkins that he would be shot at dawn.
Colonel Yang’s commander was General Mao Sen – known as ‘Bloody Mao’ – chief of Chiang’s Secret Intelligence Corps following the death of Dai Li in a suspicious plane crash in 1946. General Mao had been responsible for scores of disappearances in Shanghai in a campaign to stamp out subversive elements undermining Nationalist morale. Yang harangued Jenkins and Vine for ‘rumour-mongering’ and then passed the same death sentence on the British journalist.
The newsmen were saved when Clyde Farnsworth, a veteran reporter who had the phone number of police HQ, rang up and inquired after the welfare of his colleagues. Colonel Yang allowed Jenkins to come to the phone to prove he was still alive. ‘I am detained over the story,’ he said. ‘It is very serious. We are being treated all right.’ To save face, the two newsmen were interrogated for a further 36 hours and then released, minus a few teeth. To his family’s despair, an American news agency had already carried a report that Jenkins had been executed by firing squad.11
As a warning to Western newsmen, two Chinese ‘rumour-mongers’ were executed by Bloody Mao for spreading ‘false reports’, and a further 60 university students were arrested for possessing banners welcoming the Communists to Shanghai. To avoid further problems with the authorities, Reuters ordered Jenkins back to Hong Kong and then sent him to cover postwar events in Vietnam and Indonesia. He later launched his own newspaper, The Star, a daily tabloid in Hong Kong.
Later that day, the Chinese prime minister Ho Ying-chin announced at a meeting of government, military and civil leaders in Shanghai that the Nationalists were determined to make a stand there;
he then packed his bags and departed for Canton, while the executive yuan announced plans for the removal of government officials to that city.
Chiang Kai-shek flew out of Shanghai for the last time in early May, a broken and embittered man. He said he was ‘ashamed to be back in Canton in the present circumstances of retreat and failure. I cannot but admit that I must share a great part of the defeat.’
On the night of 24–25 May thousands of Red Army troops, clad in coarse green uniforms and clutching captured American Tommy guns, slipped silently into the sleeping city. At dawn, they began the peaceful occupation of the French Concession and then, with the guns of the Nationalist rearguard booming from other sectors of the city, systematically took over The Bund. By 8 am, the fighting was all over on the southern side of Soochow Creek.12
Across Garden Bridge in Hongkew, however, the garrison held out in the Post Office, the Embankment Building and Broadway Mansions. Well over one thousand foreigners had been herded on to the third, fourth and fifth floors of Broadway Mansions, with the heavily armed Nationalists on the ground floor. To break the siege, the Communists simply crossed the creek and turned the position, which gave the defenders the alternative of surrendering or fighting to the death, with the ultimate destruction of the buildings and heavy loss of life. They chose to surrender.
The rest of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces melted away to Canton, leaving the Communists free to celebrate their victory with a gigantic parade through the streets of Shanghai. With con- summate ease, the same crowds that had hailed the Nationalists just a few days earlier waved flags and cheered lustily for the new conquerors. When shipping companies cautiously approached the authorities for permission to bring in their ships, they were told the port was open for business.13
Commander John Proud felt ‘an enormous sense of relief, maybe we can do something now’. But he knew he must move quickly: the Communists would shortly proclaim themselves rulers of China, so the question of whether Britain and Australia would recognise the new regime or stick with Chiang Kai-shek’s discredited government was a matter of extreme urgency.
One of Proud’s Chinese agents informed him that Chou En-lai had arrived in Shanghai and introduced the Australian to Norman Watts, an English scholar who once saved Chou’s life while fighting with the Communist guerrillas against the Japanese. Watts and Proud agreed that the only way to protect British and Commonwealth interests in China would be immediate diplomatic recognition by those governments. Watts arranged for Proud to meet Chou in an apartment at Cathay Mansions in Frenchtown. Chou let Proud speak and then replied he did not see any reason why Britain and China should not be friendly. ‘There will be conditions,’ he added, ‘and above all it must be on the basis of equality.’
There was no chance of equality and, with the United States in the grip of anti-Communist hysteria, no chance of diplomatic recognition from that quarter either. After the Nationalists abandoned Shanghai, Ambassador Stuart had flown to Washington, where the administration shunted him aside. He died shortly afterwards in obscurity. Members of America’s so-called ‘Dixie Mission’ to Yenan in 1944, who had argued that the Communists were more worthy of US support than Chiang Kai-shek, lost their jobs in the State Department. The Truman administration had washed its hands of ‘the China problem’.
On 1 October 1949 Mao Tse-tung, now formally entitled ‘Chairman Mao’, stood on a platform in Tiananmen Square surrounded by a massive chanting, cheering, fist-clenching crowd and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China, with its capital at Peking, renamed Beijing (Northern Capital). One of the guests of honour was Chingling Soong – Madame Sun Yat-sen – who was met at the station by Mao, Chou En-lai and other dignitaries. ‘Today, Sun Yat-sen’s efforts at last bore fruit,’ she said.
The new regime announced that it intended to establish diplomatic relations with friendly nations. The following day the Soviet Union became the first country to recognise the new republic. Keith Officer, who had replaced Frederic Eggleston as Australian minister, was living in Shanghai. Fully expecting Australia to follow suit shortly, he packed his bags and prepared to move to Peking. But from the United States, Britain and Australia, there was only moody silence.
On 10 December Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Formosa, taking with him the vast treasure trove of Chinese art that had been stored in caves around Chungking for safekeeping during the Sino-Japanese War. Local legend had it that the island had been created by a fire-breathing dragon but Chiang’s own fire was almost extinguished – he presided over a population of just two million Nationalist refugees and 11 million Formosans.
President Truman announced in the New Year that the United States ‘would not provide military aid or advice to Chinese Forces on Formosa’. But although Truman was fed up with Chiang, the United States bluntly refused to recognise the new Communist government as the legitimate ruler of China and blocked her membership of the United Nations. The Australian cabinet under Labor prime minister Ben Chifley hesitated despite the advice of its professional advisers that early recognition was highly desirable. Then Chifley’s self-important Foreign Minister Bert Evatt sided with Dean Acheson, the hawkish American secretary of state, who demanded that Mao demonstrate that his regime actually controlled the country, that it was capable of carrying out its international obligations and that it was supported by the free will of the majority of the people. The result was stalemate.14
Any chance of friendly relations between China and the Allies evaporated over the issue of Korea. At 4 am on Sunday, 25 June 1950 the North Korean People’s Army – the In Min Gun – stormed across the 38th Parallel, the demarcation line between the Communist North ruled by Stalin’s tyrannical protégé Kim Il Sung and the capitalist South controlled by the corrupt and brutal Syngman Rhee. The following year Australia joined the United Nations forces expelling the In Min Gun from South Korea. Chou En-lai, now Chinese premier, warned the United States that ‘an American intrusion into North Korea will encounter Chinese resistance’. General MacArthur, the American commander, paid no heed to the warning and sent American and Australian troops over the border. As Allied forces approached the Yalu River on the Manchurian frontier, Mao Tse-tung unleashed a massive ‘human wave’ counter-attack against them.
By then, Wynette McDonald and Carlos Ozorio had moved to Rabaul in Papua New Guinea with their two children. Ozorio was employed as a radio technician with the Commonwealth Department of Civil Aviation. The ‘notorious collaborationist’ had got away with it.
Life, however, wasn’t so simple for many of the Australians who had seen the war at close quarters. Colin McDonald’s career as a war correspondent had come to an end in late 1942 when he was taken chronically ill with dengue fever, tonsillitis and eyestrain. He resigned from The Times and sailed to England but returned to Perth in 1948, where he worked for the ABC and The West Australian until his retirement. He died in 1983.15
His life-long friend Harold Timperley worked for the United Nations and its specialised agencies for seven years after cutting his ties with Chiang’s Ministry of Information. On resigning from UNESCO in 1950 he went to Indonesia as a technical expert attached to the Indonesian Foreign Office where his main task was training young Indonesians for diplomatic service. He returned to England after contracting a tropical illness and was working as secretary and treasurer for the War on Want campaign when he was admitted to hospital in Sussex. He died there on 26 November 1954.16
And what of the other irrepressible West Australian, William Arthur ‘Buzz’ Farmer? Having escaped from China in late 1939, he made his way to London where he covered the war in Europe, including the Normandy landings on D Day, for the Melbourne Herald. Under the name ‘Rhodes Farmer’, he published Shanghai Harvest, his graphic account of the Sino-Japanese War, to wide acclaim in 1945. He chose the name ‘Rhodes’ because his father, who had taken part in the 1895 Jameson Raid on Johannesburg, was an admirer of Cecil Rhodes, the prime
mover behind the insurrection. When he returned to Australia at the end of the war, Buzz Farmer went to live on Rottnest Island, travelling to the mainland or making overseas trips in the winter. At the age of 75, he died in Perth on 12 October 1979.
Ian Morrison had led a charmed life covering the Pacific War for The Times – he was slightly wounded in the Battle of Buna in New Guinea in 1942, fractured his vertebrae in a plane crash in December 1943 and was later shot in the thumb, while a second bullet grazed his thigh. ‘He was in danger most of the time,’ The Times official historian wrote. ‘He reported from near the firing lines; he shared the soldier’s life in the jungles; he was wounded more than once and was ill at times. His dispatches always brought clarity and colour out of the confusion of war.’17
During a spell in Hong Kong, Ian fell in love with Rosalie Chow, a beautiful Eurasian doctor who had written an important war book, Destination Chungking, under the pen-name Han Suyin. Rosalie had previously been trapped in a violent marriage to one of Chiang Kai-shek’s officers, during which she had been beaten and abused. Her husband had been killed in the Chinese civil war.
At 37, Ian Morrison was one of the first war correspondents into Korea to cover the fighting, eager to be there and to get to the heart of the story without fear or favour. On 12 August 1950 he and the British military historian Christopher Buckley were being driven by an Indian Army officer towards a destroyed North Korean tank when their jeep struck a landmine, killing all three instantly. At his funeral, an American guard of honour fired a salute and the Last Post sounded as fellow war correspondents bore his coffin to the graveside at a little mission cemetery at Taegu.
In his last dispatch, published in The Times on the day he was killed, he warned that early American military successes should not be overrated but rather be seen in relation to ‘the whole weakness of the allied position in Korea’. He was proved right – the war dragged on until a ceasefire was finally agreed in 1953.
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