Once More the Hawks

by Max Hennessy

‘So?’

  ‘So we’re putting tremendous resources into Burma. By the end of the year we expect to go over to the offensive there. There’s a new command set-up and a big propaganda campaign to indicate that the Japanese aren’t the supermen we thought they were. The aim’s to re-establish land communications with China. You’ll remember they cut the Burma Road in 1942. We’re hoping to reopen it. The Yanks have a general out there called Stilwell, and a fighter group called the Flying Tigers run by a chap called Claire Chennault gave us a lot of support. There was even a Chinese division helping. We’re now going to try to pay them back.’

  Dicken studied Hatto, puzzled. ‘What’s your interest in all this, Willie? Are they sending out a British Mission or something?’

  Hatto smiled. ‘In fact, the Americans are running the show but you know Winston. He’s not going to be nudged out of what were British spheres of influence and he’s insisted that we’re represented with the Chinese government, even if all we do is hold the Americans’ coat-tails.’

  ‘So?’

  Hatto smiled. ‘So it’s become a major preoccupation to keep China in the war. To do so, the Americans have organised their airlift over the Himalayas and, with a little assistance from us, have provided a loan of over five hundred million dollars. Unfortunately, Chiang Kai-shek, for whom I imagine, after your stay in China in 1927, you have no great love, seems to have cast a spell over Washington. Roosevelt seems to show a strange partiality for him – it’s almost become a cult in Washington, it seems – but Winston’s a bit more sceptical. Chiang keeps sticking his nose into our affairs in India and Winnie thinks Washington’s a bit like Titania captivated by Bottom. He feels that, considering the amount of money and aid that’s been sent to them, the Chinese are being remarkably unwarlike and he wants somebody to find out just what’s going on. So he’s sending a little mission of his own.’

  Hatto swallowed his drink and ordered another. ‘Some of the Americans,’ he went on, ‘have also started to grow a bit suspicious of Chiang and begun to think he’s just leading us all on, so, unknown to Roosevelt, there’s a new American mission going too. Walt Foote’s running it. After three years’ legal experience in the East he’s considered as much of an expert on China as you can get. They’ve upped him to brigadier.’

  Dicken frowned. ‘Who’s leading our lot?’ he asked. ‘You?’

  Hatto grinned at him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You! They’ve decided that a man who managed to get himself captured by a warlord called Lee Tse-liu probably knows more about the place than anyone else they can find. They’ve also heard that you speak some Chinese.’

  ‘Some’s the operative word. Do they realise how many dialects there are?’

  Hatto smiled. ‘I don’t suppose it’s occurred to ’em,’ he admitted. ‘It usually doesn’t to the clever types who think up these things. You’ll be flying in from Assam.’

  ‘It sounds hard work just getting there.’

  Hatto smiled again. ‘You pick your own staff.’

  ‘I’ll have Babington,’ Dicken said at once.

  ‘What’s he got that’s so special?’

  ‘He picks me up when I’m drunk.’

  ‘Right. He’s yours and he’ll carry the right rank. You’ve also been nudged up another notch, same as Diplock. To give you some elbow.’

  Dicken was silent and Hatto looked puzzled. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ he asked.

  Dicken smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m pleased. I was just thinking that, after twenty-five years of sitting across my career, for the first time Diplock’s finally done me a favour. And the only way he could manage to do it was by dying.’

  Hatto nodded. ‘Anyway, congratulations. It’s not before time. If we weren’t now elderly gentlemen we could do a gloat dance.’

  Dicken smiled back. ‘Perhaps we should save it until I come back. Will you be seeing me off?’

  Hatto pulled a face. ‘Not this time, old son,’ he said. ‘They need somebody in India to watch things from there. I’m coming too.’

  Two

  China hadn’t changed much. It was still the land of the empty gut.

  When they left Assam the rain was falling in solid depressing sheets and the atmosphere was that of a steam bath. Foote’s mission still hadn’t moved on and he explained the joys of flying unsuitable aircraft in an area of storms, unmapped mountain peaks, icing, overloading, accidents and unpredictable high altitude winds. It was always a toss-up whether a machine would arrive or not and their deputies were not to accompany them just in case.

  The weather was kind as they flew into Yunnan, from where they headed by road and river to Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek’s new capital in Szechwan. They were met by a cynical young American Army Air Force major called Johnson, who had once been part of Chennault’s Flying Tigers and was now part of Foote’s mission. He wore a battered cap and a leather flying jacket with a Chinese flag and a message in Chinese characters painted on the back so that if he were shot down the Chinese peasants who found him would know who he was and what to do with him.

  ‘You’ll find things a bit crazy here,’ he advised. ‘Our guys are paid in American dollars, which makes them almost millionaires, but there are also a lot of other guys, European, American and Chinese, who’re making a lot of money out of profiteering. And this place has grown so fast nobody knows where anything is. New buildings have spread like fungus. There was no steel to spare so they used bamboo corner poles, no nails so they lashed it together with bamboo strips, and no wood so they split bamboo and made wattles. And we’ve got every dialect in China here so that if you ask the way in Mandarin like I do, you get answered by a Cantonese who speaks it even worse. Everything’s written down, because messengers can’t understand what’s said to them, and the government’s given the streets high-sounding names like the Road of the People’s Heritage and the Road of the National Republic, but the rickshaw boys still call them by their old names.’

  ‘Leads to confusion,’ Foote said dryly.

  ‘Some,’ Johnson agreed.

  Despite the war, the city seemed to have lapsed into a state of indifference. It stood on a tongue of land at the junction of the Yangtze and Chialing Rivers, its boundary wall almost intact after five centuries of wear and tear. Once it had been remote and self-sufficient because Szechwan had always been considered backward by the rest of China and for six months of the year a curtain of fog and rain overhung it and coated its alleys with slime. When the Sino-Japanese War had started in 1937, refugees had poured in and government offices had migrated en masse. Pedlars, shopkeepers and politicians had followed and the population had doubled in a few months to 400,000. After the fall of Hankow it had neared a million and it was still rising.

  It had first been bombed in 1938 and, with the Chinese anti-aircraft guns ineffectual, incendiaries had started fires which had gnawed out the ancient slums, and in the back alleys men, women and children had roasted to death. But since then a lot had been rebuilt, though the scars still showed in smashed shop fronts, blackened acres of devastation and the bamboo-and-mud squalor of new housing.

  Accommodation had been provided for the two missions on the top floor of a block of offices, the bottom floors of which were filled with Chinese government departments. The entrance was swarming with children and outside women were hanging out their washing.

  ‘Wives of the Chinese junior officials,’ Johnson explained. ‘Everything’s kinda overcrowded and mostly they live in dormitories. A family that has a room’s very lucky. Most of the clerks sleep in their offices and their families live in the basement. In some ways it’s a good idea because it’s cold in winter and they keep each other warm.’

  Part of the accommodation had been made into a mess but food was difficult to obtain and the British were dependent on the Americans for rations, all of which had to be flown over the Hump. To flush them, the
lavatories were provided with a tub of muddy water, which was carried by coolies from the river, and a bath in a few inches of water was a luxury.

  Johnson let them know the position. ‘The one thing you’ll notice is the sound of dynamos,’ he said. ‘They’re always going. They never stop working. One shift takes over as the other leaves. Twenty-four hours a day.’

  There were no restrictions and no blackout and you could buy anything – fur coats, champagne, electric razors, silk stockings, army boots, guns, high octane petrol, diamonds, ever permanent waves. Provided you had the money, because stockings were 300 dollars a pair, matches 20 dollars a box. You could buy Life magazine for 500 but Esquire cost you 2000. When it wasn’t raining, the goddam place was always covered with a grey-blue mist, and when there was neither the sun came out hot enough to shrivel you. There was typhus about, too, because of the rats. An enormous number of them lay dead in the streets, so that the dark alleys were noisome with the smell of them, but nobody bothered to collect them.

  ‘It’s okay, though,’ Johnson said cynically. ‘When you get used to it.’

  General Clinton R Loomis, the American officer running things in Chungking, seemed bewildered and indignant that he was wasting his time. ‘Those guys in Washington have gone off their nuts,’ he said firmly.

  He was a large man who was built like a brewery dray, with a deep chest and square shoulders. He liked the British, always called Foote by his civilian title, ‘Judge’, and most of the time had a cigar like a telegraph pole sticking out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Sending all this aid, all this goddam money, and that slimy bastard, Chiang, the Generalissimo, is just using it to make sure of his hold on the country.’

  He tried to explain. ‘Before Pearl Harbour,’ he said, ‘he decided that if he just held on, Japan would be bound to collide with the US eventually and when she did China could just retire from the fight and leave it to fresher forces – us. The bastard isn’t doing a thing! It’s just one lousy snafu. Tell ’em, Johnny. You know it as well as I do.’

  Johnson added his mite. ‘The performance of the Chinese troops,’ he said dryly, ‘so far has been unmemorable.’

  ‘That goddam Chiang’s always threatening that China’s on the point of collapse,’ Loomis snorted. ‘He says his position’s calamitous. And the more he makes of it the more effort those guys in Washington make for him. They fancy America taking the place in China of the old imperial powers.’ He looked at Dicken and grinned. ‘Your outfit. But the bastard’s using all the material and money we send him to blockade the Communists, who are fighting the Japanese.’

  ‘Aren’t they both fighting the Japanese?’ Foote asked.

  ‘They’re supposed to be, Judge, but only the Communists are achieving anything. They’re penning the Nips into the towns in the north but they don’t trust Chiang and won’t work with him. Can’t say I blame them. It’s a bit like a civil war with the Communists trying to spread their influence and Chiang trying to stop them. Each side’s got its own territory and if one moves into the other’s they’re driven out by force. In 1941 the communist Fourth Route Army was ambushed. It was sheer treachery and there was a lot of fighting and the Commies lost seven generals. Chou En-lai was here in Chungking at the time, too, trying to keep things on an even keel. Now Chiang’s using 200,000 of his best just troops to keep the Communists out of his territory because he knows they’re dangerous to his goddam régime.’

  The general lit a fresh cigar, blew out smoke, waved his hand and sighed. It seemed to diminish him from a military man to a worried executive. ‘General Stilwell, who’s running the show out here,’ he pointed out, ‘hates old Dogleg Chiang, but he likes China and keeps trying to get the Chinese to fight, when any goddam halfwit can see they don’t have to, because even by not doing anything they’re tying down whole Japanese armies. And the reports he’s sending on the Communists, because they do fight, are so goddam glowing, those guys in Washington are now beginning to think they’ve got roses growing all over ’em.’

  ‘Does Chiang want to make peace?’

  Loomis’ cigar circled in the air. ‘He daren’t. The country wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t, anyway, and you guys have got to produce proof that his men aren’t a romantic army fighting against odds but a military rabble that in some parts of the country have even started trading with the Japs.’

  ‘Stilwell’s all right,’ he went on. ‘But he’s got some lousy subordinates and he and Chennault hate each other, while some of the guys they send us might just as well have stayed at home. They think this place’s Minnesota or Nevada or Missouri, they call the Chinese “Slopeheads” or “Slopeys”, and the US Government “Uncle Chump from over the Hump”. Chiang Kai-shek’s “Chancre Jack” and Sun Yat-sen’s “Sunset Sam”. Those people back home have no idea what it’s like out here.’

  ‘Do we know anything about a man called General Lee Tse-liu?’ Dicken asked.

  The general’s head whipped round. ‘I sure hope you’re not goin’ to ask any favours for him.’

  Dicken laughed. ‘Not on your life. I’d like to meet him with a Lancaster with a full load of bombs.’

  Loomis smiled. ‘There are some bastards in Chiang’s outfit,’ he said. ‘But I’d say Lee was the biggest of the lot. He sits on his ass and uses his soldiers to collect rice to sell to the Nips. He’s made a fortune out of the Chinese peasants and he’s now making another. But he’s Chiang’s favourite general and he’s here in Chungking at the moment. He’s always ass-licking in Chungking. He leaves his troops to his chief of staff, a guy called Colonel Kok, while he organises his loot for the time when he can bolt for somewhere safe. I’ll fix you an interview with old Dogleg. You might meet him there. What do you intend to do? Spit in his eye?’

  The meeting was organised for the following day. The Generalissimo was fixedly calm, his pate clean-shaven – ‘So there’ll be no tell-tale grey fuzz,’ Johnson whispered – and he wore a spotless tunic bare of decorations tightly buttoned to his throat. He greeted them in a clear high voice.

  ‘They say,’ Johnson murmured, ‘that he lives pretty frugally and that he’s incorruptible, but that’s because by Chinese standards he’s got everything he needs. They say he’s slipping, though, and that some of his supporters are beginning to turn against him. Twenty-seven of his generals went over to the Japs, thinking they’d get a better deal.’

  Madame Chiang was very different. She was small and beautifully dressed, speaking English with an American accent acquired during her schooling at an American college. Johnson was as unimpressed with her as with her husband. ‘They say she’s as ruthless as hell,’ he murmured. ‘They say she signs death warrants with her own hand.’

  The meeting produced nothing. Chiang remained poker-faced throughout, saying little and offering nothing, while his wife, chattering gaily, produced only charm.

  General Lee Tse-liu, who had grown plump and well-fed and had not lost his strange affected English manner of speaking, clearly failed to recognise Dicken as the man he’d once held prisoner with the American priest, Father O’Buhilly.

  ‘I was studying in England in 1914,’ he said as they were introduced. ‘I tried to join the British army, don’t you know? But, by Jove, they felt they shouldn’t enlist Chinese in a British squabble.’

  It was a different version from the one he’d told Dicken in 1927 when he’d bitterly described how his enthusiasm for the British Empire had been turned to hatred by a fool in red tabs who’d told him they ‘didn’t want wogs in the British army’.

  ‘Those were jolly difficult days,’ he went on. ‘Everybody was jolly well against China then. Now they’re friendly because they know we’re holding the fort against the Japanese.’

  ‘That the guy?’ Foote asked as he moved away.

  ‘That’s him,’ Dicken agreed. ‘It’s a pity Diplock didn’t make it. They w
ere two of a kind.’ He turned to Johnson. ‘So far,’ he said, ‘we’ve learned a lot about Chiang Kai-shek. How about telling us something about the Chinese army?’

  Johnson grinned. ‘You know what Ludendorff said about the Austrians in the last war – “We’re allied to a corpse.” It’s the same with Chiang’s army. It’s tired, discouraged and not even wanted by its own people. The guys are brave enough but they’ve been neglected, they’ve got no transport and no leadership, and only the poorest and the stupidest get drafted. The relations between the top officers and the men are goddam terrible and most of the soldiers don’t see their families for years. They have nothing to fight for, and for most of them being in the army’s just like being dead because the guys at the front live entirely on rice and vegetables – supposed to be twenty-four ounces a day but usually less – with a few beans or mouldy turnips. Meat comes occasionally. At first our guys couldn’t understand why Chinese regiments always seemed to be carrying dead dogs. They soon learned when they lost their own pets. Dogs were food to the Chinese and the mutts our guys keep eat as much as a Chinese soldier.’

  Foote was listening quietly, clearly a little shaken. ‘And what the hell can we do about all this?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ Johnson said. ‘It’s a waste of time. Senior officers are incompetent or corrupt and the campaigns are nothing but foraging expeditions; and when the Nips aren’t lashing out, the result’s stalemate, in a belt of No Man’s Land fifty to a hundred miles deep right up the middle of the country, because the Chinese have destroyed every road, bridge, railway and ferry and burned the villages and towns. And the blockade’s useless anyway, because the Chinese get cloth, rubber, tyres, medicines and petrol from the Japanese in the same way the Japs get Chinese tungsten, tin and other things.’ Johnson shrugged. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘a hell of a way to fight a war.’

  Though the air raids on Chungking had long since died down, in their place had come hunger and discomfort and thousands of people were living in a nightmare of inflation. But the profiteers were being very discreet and there was no bright plumage visible, though they heard of officials’ wives having new dresses flown over the Hump from India and of offers being made to Western Transport officers to use their vehicles to make a fortune. Meanwhile, it was startling to find the Chinese press attacking the United States and painting a picture of the riotous life being lived by American soldiers.