Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  I also owe descriptions of the working conditions and life of girls working in the Shanghai mills to Emily Hong’s book Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949.

  Soong Ching-Ling, Li Dequan & Shi Liang

  All three of these women were socialists and practising Christians.

  Soong Chingling, widow of Sun Yat-sen and sister of Madame Chiang, served in various communist governments from 1949 until 1981. She was Vice President of China from 1949 until 1975.

  Li Dequan, wife of General Feng Yuxiang, became the first Minister of Health in 1949 and continued in senior government positions almost until her death in 1972. She only joined the Communist Party in 1958.

  Shi Liang, the ferocious lawyer and ferocious defender of children, was the first Minister of Justice of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1959.

  Agnes Smedley

  Much of Agnes’s life has been covered in the book.

  At one stage (Book 3, Chapter 12) I have Agnes denying she is spying on Freda but in fact she probably was for the Soviet Union – though this might be mere Cold War propaganda. If she was, she was working for her ex-lover Richard Sorge, the twentieth century’s greatest and most successful spy.

  In 1941 he had embedded himself as a German officer in the Japanese intelligence agencies in Tokyo. There he learnt that the Japanese were to attack Pearl Harbor, not to go westwards into Russia. This news reached Russia as Hitler arrived at the gates of Moscow and enabled Stalin, now certain he would not be attacked by the Japanese, to transfer all his crack troops from the Far East to turn back the Nazi attack on Moscow. This event won the war for the Allies, saved democracy in Western Europe and probably in the rest of the world. Such is war!

  Sorge was discovered by the Japanese and later executed.

  There is, however, no likelihood that Agnes (if she spied for the Soviet Union) ever reported to Moscow on Freda. Freda – who became virulently anti-communist later in life – continued always to speak in the highest possible terms of Agnes, even after the (probably true) stories about Agnes and Sorge came out.

  After the Second World War – during which she spent most of her time marching with and reporting on the communist armies – Agnes returned to the US to fight the growing McCarthyite witch-hunt against those who had ‘lost China’ to the communists. Unwell, and under enormous pressure, she then fled to England where she died in 1951, aged fifty-eight, after an ulcer operation.

  Brave heart.

  Freda Utley’s heartfelt encomium to her is published in the Freda Utley section of these notes. It was written after Freda would have known the accusations of Agnes being a spy.

  Avoid the Wikipedia article on Agnes. It drips its usual neo-McCarthyite, neo-Cold War liberal poison against her.

  Rewi Alley

  Following George Hogg’s death in 1945, Rewi Alley took over running his school.

  With the end of the civil war in 1949 he settled in Beijing but continued to tour the world, espousing especially nuclear disarmament. He was honoured by the New Zealand government in 1985, being made a Companion of the Queen’s Service Order. The award ceremony finished, the prime minister turned to him and said: ‘New Zealand has had many great sons, but you, Sir, are our greatest son.’

  He died, aged ninety, in Beijing in 1987.

  Fang the Builder

  Fang’s method of work is partly built on the similar working methods of a friend I have in my village. He spends hours just staring at the stones before building a stone wall which is always delightful to see with his subtle colour plays between all the different stones and the fossils placed so cleverly within it. He also lays a mean hedge. He once did an exquisite long winding hedge right next to – two or three feet from – a very busy road. A dangerous place to work. When finished, with all the splinted wood in it, it twisted and turned like a white snake.

  He is the sort of person that deserves an Arts Council grant. A large Arts Council grant. Except he’s never heard of the Arts Council and the Arts Council is far too stupid and out-of-touch to have ever heard of him.

  He has had a variety of cider named after him.

  Evans Carlson

  In 1933 Evans Carlson, of the US Marine Corps, was in charge of President Roosevelt’s military guard. He and FDR became close friends.

  While in Wuhan as a military observer Carlson wrote many letters to FDR about the situation in China. Fascinated by the way the Chinese communist guerrilla forces in North-West China related to and cooperated with the peasantry, he spent many months marching with and observing the Communist Eighth Route Army’s guerrilla tactics.

  A man of strong socialist principles, in 1942 he founded ‘Carlson’s Raiders’ within the US Marine Corps. Abolishing the normal caste divisions between different ranks, he developed tactics which he copied from the Chinese communist guerrillas. He led the famous Makin Raid and then ‘the Long Raid’ behind the Japanese lines in Guadalcanal in 1942, adopting the phrase ‘gung ho’, used by the communists to describe their soldiers positive attitudes, for use within the US Marine Corps. The phrase has since developed an ironic life of its own.

  Carlson, relieved of his command for his political beliefs, and worn out by his intensely active military life and by various tropical diseases, died at the early age of fifty-one in 1947.

  He is generally credited with being the founder of American special forces.

  Colonels Vasily Chuikov and Georgy Zhukov

  Colonels Vasily Chuikov and Georgy Zhukov went on to command Russian forces at the Battle of Stalingrad. It is obvious that they employed there many of the strategies and tactics thought out and improvised by the Chinese generals at Taierzhuang.

  Georgy Zhukov was the single most important individual in the overthrow of European Nazism.

  In August 1945 US General Eisenhower visited Moscow and became friends with Zhukov. He stated: ‘To no one man does the United Nations owe a greater debt than to Marshal Zhukov […] one day […] there is certain to be another Order of the Soviet Union. It will be the Order of Zhukov, and that order will be prized by every man who admires courage, vision, fortitude, and determination in a soldier.’

  Zhukov had always had a very difficult relationship with Stalin, who had been on the verge of executing him on several occasions. Zhukov fell into obscurity in the Soviet Union after the war. His role was only fully recognized in 1995.

  *

  Any individuals in the book I have not included in this list can, probably, be looked up online. With the exception of the Wei family and The Drab, of course, who are entirely fictional.

  The American Firebombing of Wuhan, December 1944

  One sad footnote to the sufferings of Wuhan should be added. Having survived the horrors of Japanese occupation, the citizens of Wuhan had to go through one more horror before the war finally ended for them.

  In the autumn of 1944 General Curtis LeMay was put in charge of the strategic bombing of Chinese and Japanese cities. With ninety-four brand-new B-29 Superfortress bombers, LeMay used the new techniques of low-level incendiary bombing – first developed in Europe by the RAF – to bomb Wuhan in preparation for the later firebombing of Tokyo and Japan.

  Forty thousand Wuhan citizens died in this bombardment.

  a Freda Utley, China at War

  b Anna Louise Strong, One-fifth of Mankind. New York 1938. Available free on the internet.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks go to:

  Liz MacLeod, executive producer, Meridian Line Films (China projects); Stephen Griffiths. Liu Yamin; Dr Joanne Ferguson for her medical advice on the text; Freda; Ruth and daughters and grandchildren; Candace. Janet Rundle and the other excellent staff at the brilliant and indispensable Shepton Mallet Library who’ve helped me so much, finding me the books I have needed over the years. ‘Use it!’; Stan and Wendy for tea, sympathy, wine, magnificent Italian cooking and advice on my text. My literary agents Oliver and Mic Cheetham. My editor Clare Gordon. My publi
sher Nic Cheetham. My TV and radio agent Norman North. Robert Temple, Somerset’s resident sinologist, friend of Lao She’s family. Eddie Donnelly and Michael Simpson for comradeship (except when it comes to Catholicism). Dr Chunyun Li for her very kind translation of some Lao She. Dave Chapple for his powerful and emotional speeches and endless trade union work, and him and Glen for their friendship. Father Dom Bede Rowe for his counselling and homilies; Our Vicar, Gawd bless ’er, for continuing to think when everyone else has given up. Des and Di. My son, partner, and rather vigorous granddaughter; my parents and two sisters and numerous offcuts; Rory Meek; Diana Howard and Rose Batty; Cadi; Ros Henderson; Rosie Edwards for the long and extremely helpful conversation I had with her about her experiences of treating traumatized refugee children on the Greek island of Lesbos (they’re still stuck there!); Misha Graham Patel; Suzanne Collins.

  ENDNOTES

  1 Although I’ve given these ‘poems’ to a fictional character, in fact these poems are by the now forgotten American communist poet Joseph Freeman. He published much of his revolutionary verse in The New Masses, a journal of the interwar American literary left.

  2 This enthusiastic evocation of the Lee Enfield Mark 4 owes much to George MacDonald Fraser’s encomium to it in his superb memoir of his service in the Burma campaign, Quartered Safe Out Here.

  3 Agnes Smedley witnessed one such railway workers/blacksmith cooperative and reported on it and photographed it.

  http://www.chinaww2.com/2014/07/16/a-social-and-visual-history-of-the-dadao-chinas-military-big-saber-ii/

  4 This description of Chiang Kai-shek was not uninfluenced by the columnist Matthew Parris’s brilliant description of Theresa May in The Times.

  5 Chiang Kai-shek had false teeth. In moments of great rage with a subordinate he was known to remove his false teeth and throw them at him. Madame Chiang was said to keep spare sets of his dentures in her handbag for him.

  6 Such is the potency and potential for destruction that this psalm is said to contain, until recently it was banned in several African countries.

  7 Extraordinarily the evil and destructive theories of eugenics were not buried for ever after the barbarisms of World War II, but even now are making a comeback in alt-right circles around the world, not least in the unscientific and disastrous theories of ‘herd immunity’ being applied to the fight against Covid-19.

  8 http://21stcenturywire.com/2018/05/02/in-honour-of-the-syrian-arab-army-and-allies-war-on-terror/

  9 Amazingly, Robert Capa survived as a war photographer, including taking famous photographs of the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach, until he was killed covering the 1954 First Indochina War in Vietnam.

  10 Still an excellent read – still available for free online and all good bookshops!

  11 Chen Lifu lived to 100 and died in 2001 on his chicken farm in New Jersey. Although he disliked Chiang Kai-shek’s slickness and lack of morality, as a Confucian believer in traditional hierarches and faithfulness to one’s emperor he continued to serve him through the Second World War and the Chinese Civil War, not leaving his service until the Nationalist government had been evacuated to Taiwan in 1949.

  Dismissing all governments as corrupt and self-serving, he bought his chicken farm in America. As he wrote: ‘From now on, I will never serve anybody and will never have this kind of feeling again when looking after the chickens.’ He attributed his longevity to: ‘The ability to fall asleep quickly, a good temper, good memory, a healthy diet with mostly vegetables and drinking only boiled water.’

  I owe the story of how the ancient emperors dealt with the merchant classes to my old friend John Michell (now unfortunately dead) – Platonist, radical traditionalist, visionary, wit and rediscoverer of ley lines.

  12 The descriptions of this air raid are taken almost verbatim from Freda Utley’s own description of it in China at War, George Hogg’s writings including from his book I See a New China, and Vasily Grossman’s superb wartime novel The People Immortal – now almost unobtainable in the West because it is not anti-Soviet – in which Grossman graphically describes a German air raid on a Soviet city.

  13 Page, Bruce, Leitch, David, Knightley, Phillip, The Philby Conspiracy, Doubleday (1968).

  14 It was Major General Sir Stewart Menzies who, later in his career, recruited into MI6 that ultimate unpaid spy, working for his masters ‘out of pure idealism’ – Kim Philby. Others included, notably, Guy Burgess.

  If the point of being in MI6 during the war was killing Nazis, Menzies certainly got his money’s worth with Kim Philby. While most of MI6 couldn’t decide whether it hated communists or Nazis more, Philby – citizens of his beloved Soviet Union being slaughtered in their millions by the Nazis – set about silently and efficiently killing Germans in large numbers, while his fellow officers wavered to and fro.

  15 The description of this extraordinary event involving Donald Hankey, especially my final paragraph, is taken from Munroe Scott’s wonderful biography of Dr Robert McClure, McClure: The China Years, published in 1977.

  16 In fact Agnes probably was spying for the Soviet Union – though this might be mere Cold War propaganda. See notes on Freda Utley.

  17 Freda Utley did not discover until 1956 that her husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was dead. But she was told no details of his death. After her own death in 1978, her son, Jon Basil Utley, learnt in 2004 from the Russian government that his father had died in 1938 in front of a firing squad for leading a hunger strike in his Siberian prison labour camp.

  18 Although Defend Wuhan! is still one of Lao She’s more celebrated works, I have never been able to track down an English language translation of it. There are also no actual descriptions of the event that I have been able to find. So I’m afraid my version of the event is almost entirely imaginary.

  There is only one account of it I have seen. The writer Han Suyin describes it in her autobiographical novel Destination Chungking (1942). As a newlywed she attended a performance of it with her husband, a young staff officer in Chiang Kai-shek’s army. Her husband was killed in 1947 during the Chinese Civil War which followed the end of the Second World War. She then fell in love with Ian Morrison, a married Australian war correspondent based in Singapore, who was killed in Korea in 1950. She wrote an account of their affair in her famous novel A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952)

  Han Suyin found watching Lao She’s Defend Wuhan! a profoundly moving experience.

  19 The editorial quoted in this chapter immediately became notorious as the most dishonest piece of journalism The Times had ever printed – at least until Rupert Murdoch took over.

  20 In fact fascism had not won, as we all now know. But one of the key actors in its eventual defeat was present in Wuhan and a member of the Last Ditch Club – Vernon Bartlett. Vernon returned to Britain and fought his by-election.

  The Bridgwater by-election of November 1938 was one of the most extraordinary by-elections in British history. Uniquely, it was a by-election fought entirely on matters of foreign policy – namely, Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement. Only two months after Chamberlain returned in ‘triumph’ from Munich – Vernon Bartlett swept to victory in a deeply rural and poverty-stricken constituency with a resounding majority. It was the first democratic vote in the world against fascism. And, like the Brexit referendum vote of 2016, it was a clear cry of rage from the provinces at the disastrous and shameful policies of the metropolitan government.

  Chamberlain’s defeat at Bridgwater was the beginning of the end of his premiership.

  The Bridgwater by-election plays a central role in my 2012 audio play Sea Change, which can be downloaded on Amazon.

  Brian Smedley, who has also written a play on the by-election, has created a Vernon Bartlett website at: http://www.vernonbartlett.co.uk/which-side-are-you-on/vernon-bartlett/

  21 I have transposed George Hogg’s epic trek with sixty orphans to escape the Japanese (and the Nationalist Chinese, who wanted to recruit the boys into their army) from when it actually took place, in 1945,
back to 1938 – though Hogg was present in Wuhan in 1938.

  With initial help from Rewi Alley and the communists, George, his children and the New Zealand nurse Kathleen Hall trekked 700 miles, through remote mountains and terrible winter weather, to Shandan in Gansu Province. There, as he promised, he set up a school and vegetable gardens where they fed and educated each other and played together.

  In July 1945 Hogg accidentally stubbed his toe and died a few days later of sepsis. The children sang him nursery songs he had taught them to soothe him as he died. Two of the boys commandeered a motor bike and drove it 250 miles to purchase medicines to save him but they were too late.

  In 2008 a feature film, Escape from Huang Shi, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chow Yun-fat, Radha Mitchell and Michelle Yeoh, was made about their heroic journey. Particularly moving are the final sequences, which are interviews with his orphans – all now old men – talking about the lifelong effect George Hogg had had on them.

  He wrote an autobiography (well worth reading and available online!): I See a New China.

  Brave soul.

  22 For this evocation of a fruit market I owe a lot to Lao She’s great novel The Yellow Storm. Not all the fruits mentioned here necessarily ripen at the same time but I was going for effect.

  23 These descriptions of the passage up the Yangtze owe something to the writings of Christopher Isherwood, Richard McKenna’s novel The Sand Pebbles, and George Hogg. And in the descriptions of the gorges, some images have been used from Lao She’s Jian Bei Pian, his epic poem of his travels on foot around wartime China.

  See ‘Jian Bei Pian: Lao She’s Forgotten Wartime Epic Poem’ by Janette Briggs: