Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  Strikes and slowdowns were a constant threat, and though by the early 1970s the main sources of disruption had been largely tamped down, there were agitators and troublemakers aplenty still active. Many were active in the labor unions, and most especially of all, there were many among the workers who came each day to hammer and chip, weld and paint, on Mr. Tung’s great white whale of—as they liked to see her—a onetime British imperialist, white man’s ship.

  Moreover, the ship now sported a new symbol sure to envenom the more radical of these workers. Tung’s company symbol was a plum blossom, and he demanded it be etched onto the old Queen’s two funnels. The flower was not the Tung logo alone; it was also a symbol of Taiwan, the island republic that had broken away from Communist China, and was particularly loathed and despised for having done so.

  But if the workers on the ship felt they had cause to abominate their bosses, the Tung managers had their own reasons to be irritated with the workers. They grumbled, for instance, when the laborers left the ship each lunchtime to eat ashore, declining a bizarre offer by Tung’s managers to stage Cantonese operas in the liner’s ballroom in an effort to persuade them to stay. Many of the painters and cleaners demanded time to play poker and mah-jongg, ran onboard gambling rings, and demanded to smoke whenever and wherever they liked.

  Moreover, it was also believed that many of the dockyard workers were members of the Triads, the Mafia-like secret societies that practiced big- and small-scale villainy in a colony that was riddled with corruption and whose police force did little to clamp down on the gangs’ activities. Anyone who objected to the workers’ right to smoke, gamble, or eat where they liked could easily be hacked to pieces with a meat cleaver, the weapon of choice, both now and back then, for the Triads’ pitiless hit men.

  Yet despite all this poisonous stew, C. Y. Tung remained confident that things were going well and that his Seawise University project would work out in the end—that is, until people spotted smoke shortly after 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, January 9. Wintertime weather in Hong Kong is more often than not calm, clear, and, to most non-Asians, comfortably warm. That morning, barbecues were getting under way on a score of rooftops at the western end of Hong Kong Island and up on the mid-levels of Victoria Peak. As the first gin and tonics were poured, those gathered together couldn’t help focusing on the great newly painted white liner gleaming brightly in the southern sunshine.

  Then, at once, they began to notice that all along the ranks of portholes, from the ship’s stem to her very stern, and on three of her decks, black, oily smoke started streaming out into the clear winter air. This joined into a cloud, which the morning breeze blew in their direction. Within minutes, the lunching hundreds could smell an acrid, chemical, greasy industrial smoke, heavy and sinister.

  The greatest old ship of the British Empire was on fire.

  But no fireboats came, not right away. A local accountant was giving his English fiancée’s parents a Sunday boat ride around the harbor, and the four of them stayed, entranced, for three hours. For the first hour no rescue craft came, and they watched with amazement as the blazes consolidated, as explosions began to rock the ship, and as curtains of fire began to race uncontrollably along the vast superstructure. It became swiftly clear that the great liner was doomed to burn, and to sink—and that there were people aboard who needed to be rescued.

  It was a full hour before the first fireboats arrived, including the Sir Alexander Grantham, the powerful red-painted vessel that had welcomed the liner six months earlier with vertical jets and curtains of colored water. Instead, today, tens of thousands of gallons of hastily inhaled seawater would be thrust onto the burning ship to drench and protect the police and ambulance crews who were trying to get everyone off her. Which they did, and successfully, even rescuing a worker’s child (who of course should not have been on the ship), who was tied to a rope and lowered over the stern to a waiting tugboat. They also found and took to safety C. H. Tung, C.Y.’s son, who was making a Sunday visit and who would in time inherit the family firm.

  No one died that Sunday; nor was anyone badly hurt, except for one man who broke his leg jumping from a porthole and onto a waiting police launch. Nor was anyone hurt the next morning, after all the hoses had been turned off and when the ship was charred black and smoldering and listing alarmingly to starboard, readying herself to founder.

  This she did almost precisely at noon, slumping down on her starboard side and into the mud. She died with more of a whimper than a bang, though, with her port-side hull red hot, with fires still burning and setting off dull thumps of explosions that could be heard from deep in her bunkers.

  Tung was in Paris at the time, and wept upon hearing the news. In time, insurance paid up eight million dollars, more than twice Tung’s purchase price for the ship, though less than he had spent in total since the ship left her berth in Florida. That insurance payment raised eyebrows; the probable presence of the Triads aboard raised eyebrows; the savage distemper of the Communists in the labor unions working on the ship prompted suspicions; the delay in the fireboats’ arrival led to still more puzzlement; and Hong Kong’s reputation as a sink of corruption made few confident that the obvious two questions—who had done it, and why?—would ever be either properly asked or fully answered.

  And this remains the case. All that is certain today, nearly forty years on, is that fires broke out simultaneously in nine different places and that they were deliberately set. But the official reports do not offer a sophisticated conclusion as to who might have set them.2 The courts have never decided why or who, and the confidential police file on the matter remains open to this day. Most Cunard officials believe the ship was the victim of sabotage, most probably politically inspired. The Tung family still regards any political motive as wholly improbable.

  The ship was scrapped where she lay. About three-quarters of the steel from the wreck was salvaged. Divers employed by a South Korean company worked with acetylene torches to cut her into bite-size chunks, which were then taken away to be smelted into girders for use in Hong Kong’s many new housing projects. Her brassware, screws included, was sold to the Parker Pen Company, and five thousand “QE75” pens were made with brass inlays and nibs, and with a solemnly worded certificate of authenticity from the Tung’s Island Navigation Corporation.

  The salvage work became increasingly difficult, as the divers had to venture deeper and deeper—one of them blowing himself up with an accidentally placed gelignite charge—until work was halted in March 1978. Twenty thousand tons of the liner remained buried in the mud south of Tsing Yi Island—including her keel, John Brown’s Keel Number 552, which had formed the enduring base of the largest riveted ship ever made.

  For years, her resting place was marked on navigation charts with the green notation that signified a wreck. There was a buoy, and passing mariners were cautioned not to get too close. Then the island near where she sank was expanded with landfill and pilings and cement, and most of the ruined vessel now lies beneath the wharves and walkways and crane tracks of the territory’s main container port.

  The saga has an interesting coda, which began to unfold soon after C. Y. Tung’s death in 1982. His son C. H. Tung took over the family’s new-formed shipping company, Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL), the firm having realized, rightly, that containerization was the wave of the Pacific’s maritime future. But it was not a future the company principals were apparently geared to meet, and the firm soon ran into heavy weather, and needed cash. But—and here is the irony—it was not Taiwan that eventually bailed Tung out, but Communist China. China’s banks loaned him $120 million, and from that moment on, according to one sardonic Hong Kong civil servant, Tung was effectively owned by the mainland party, and henceforward did Beijing’s bidding as his masters saw fit.

  They did not wait long to call in his obligations. Britain’s century and a half of sovereignty over Hong Kong would end at midnight on June 30, 1997, and the Chinese would take over. Beijing decided t
hat it would be Tung Chee Hwa (C. H. Tung, newly styled) who would become the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of what would now be called the special administrative region of Hong Kong. Mr. Tung was a shipowner, a man with no knowledge of running a country, or even part of one. But that was perhaps not the point. For, ever since China’s banks bailed him out, he was in China’s debt, and he would be unfailingly loyal.

  He had shown this already, in a speech given just one month before the handover of sovereignty. It was a speech that chilled some spines: “Freedom is not unimportant,” he said. “But the West just doesn’t understand Chinese culture. It is time to reaffirm who we are. Individual rights are not as important as order in our society [my emphasis]. That is how we are.”

  The Pacific was slowly shifting gears. Those Europeans who had for so long pulled the levers of power in the region were gradually leaving, saying their farewells. A new order was coming to the fore. The United Nations had been eagerly promoting the benefits of decolonization ever since the end of the Second World War, when seven hundred fifty million of the world’s peoples were governed by outsiders and aliens. By the 1970s the old imperial possessions were beginning to shrink like ice cubes on a stove top. New commanders were on the bridge, giving their directions, mouthing their orders, dictating the region’s future with either caution or swiftness or relief, according to their own devices. On great ships, on tiny islands, and along exotic coastlines, all around.

  This new order produced many farewells, some poignant, others lethally violent. The sabotaging of the great British ocean liner, and the elevation to power of a man who was so intimately involved with her fate, serve as a potent symbol—but as a symbol only. Other farewells were very much more savage, and some had global repercussions. The most notoriously dramatic and costliest of these had to be the enforced departure of the Americans from Vietnam in the spring of 1975. For it was only then, and after more than a century, that the various states3 of Indochina, bastions of the western Pacific hinterland, were at last able to rule themselves again. Foreign domination had utterly defined the recent history of the Southeast Asian peninsula. But the process of restoring governance to the various Indochinese peoples (the Vietnamese, the Lao, and the Khmer) was a far more protracted business than the infamous nine years of America’s own ill-judged involvement there, which cost the lives of fifty-eight thousand of its young men and women, and two million or more of those who claimed these countries as their own.

  The French had ruled in Indochina—had owned Indochina, as colonists like to claim—ever since their capture of Saigon in 1859. Though the French were as imperially oppressive as any, they are generally seen today as having been more benign and cultured than such philistine ruffians as the Dutch and the British, and the legacy of their sovereignty—a local fondness for wine; the number of surviving boulangeries; the pidgin French still heard there in the cities from Hanoi to Luang Prabang, from Kompong Som to Hue—is still well thought of, and offers to yesterday’s “Indochine” a veneer of exotic and erotic Eastern chic. Even so, all empires, benign or brutal, inevitably fade, and the drawing down of French influence in South East Asia would get under way swiftly, soon after the Second World War.

  It is conventional to see France’s humiliating defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in far northern Vietnam in 1954 as the beginning of the end of France’s land tenure in the western Pacific. But one other episode, half-forgotten now, marks the ultimate cause of the whole unlovely mess, of which Dien Bien Phu was but one part. It occurred in 1945, and it concerns a much-decorated British Indian Army officer named Douglas David Gracey. The strange events that briefly enfolded him offer invaluable context for what would occur in the years following.

  For Major General Gracey had been handed the unusual, unprecedented appointment, at the Pacific War’s end, of commander in chief, Allied Land Forces French Indochina. He was dispatched to Saigon—a senior British army officer from India ordered to preside over a French colony that was at the time occupied by defeated Japanese invaders must surely be one of the more curious pieces of political flotsam to wash up in the wake of war. Gracey was aware of the sensitivities of the situation: for six heady months, and from a hastily built British military headquarters in southern Vietnam, he directed his twenty thousand soldiers through one of the most bizarre periods in modern Indochinese history—with the specific avowed aim (since restoring the imperial status quo was Winston Churchill’s stated policy) of returning the territory to the imperial rule of the French. His expedition’s name was Operation Masterdom.

  Gracey and his troops had been ordered into Saigon because those Allied politicians who in 1945 were planning Indochina’s fate—a peripheral issue in the Potsdam Conference, held after victory was ensured in Europe—had been blindsided by Japan’s unexpectedly swift surrender. Vietnam had long been occupied by Japan, and now the Japanese soldiers involved in the mechanics of that occupation had all to be disarmed and packed off home, much as their brother soldiers were to be sent home from various other places in the Pacific.

  But what Gracey had not expected was the impassioned opposition to his mission by the Viet Minh nationalists in Saigon.4 No matter that he was there to turf out the Japanese occupiers: as soon as he arrived, in September 1945, he noted that the road from the Saigon airport was lined with people waving Viet Minh flags and holding posters that supposedly welcomed him and his forces, but that demanded also that the French colonists leave. Since British policy (Churchill’s policy) was precisely the opposite, Gracey smelled trouble.

  He first refused point-blank to cooperate with the Viet Minh. His job, as he saw it, was simply to free all Allied prisoners of war, to ease the French back into running the country, and to get the Japanese garrisons out of the country. The Viet Minh did not take kindly to the general’s insouciantly dismissive attitude. They staged strikes and closed down the Saigon market. Gracey retaliated by shutting down the newspapers; declaring what was effectively martial law; and freeing a particularly violent group of former French soldiers, who promptly armed themselves, initiated a citywide version of a coup d’état, and embarked on acts of vengeance against everyone who stood in their way—Viet Minh nationalists most especially.

  Fighting erupted, and quickly spread everywhere. Gracey and his infantrymen and his kukri-wielding Gurkha battalions from Nepal, tore into the fight with gusto. His superiors back in Singapore told him to stop, saying the battles were none of his business, were nothing to do with Britain. But such was the ferocity of some of the attacks (one of them with rifles, spears, and poisoned arrows) on British positions that he was eventually given carte blanche and told his new duty was to “pacify” the region.

  That’s when Gracey made one of the most curious of all postwar decisions, aware that because he had not had time to ship them out, he had thousands of disarmed Japanese troops still in the area. Since they knew the city and knew how to fight, Gracey gave them guns and demanded that they stand alongside his British soldiers against the Viet Minh nationalists.

  Of all the many bizarreries of the time, this was among the most extreme. The notion that Japanese troops would be armed by those who had recently vanquished them and that they would then be compelled to fight under a British flag alongside Nepalese soldiers for a French colonial ideal against a Vietnamese force that was demanding its own people’s independence is well-nigh incomprehensible.

  But it worked. With the help of the Japanese—“they did their job with characteristic efficiency,” said one Gurkha officer, noting, in addition, that they may have reduced “casualties among our own troops”—the British did in the end succeed in pacifying the region.

  By October, matters had quieted down enough that the French could indeed return, as Churchill had ordered. The magnificently aristocratic French general Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque assumed the reins in Saigon, and early in 1946, Major General Gracey was able to conclude his tenure in Vietnam, to take his soldiers back with him to India, and to res
ume something of a quiet life.5

  Unwittingly, though, Gracey had so angered the Viet Minh by his disdain, his arrogance, and his brutal battles against them that some insist it was he who case-hardened Ho Chi Minh’s opposition to the West, and indeed to all continued Western interest in the region. Ho’s opposition to all future outside interference in Indochina became, from that time onward, unyielding, implacable. Critics of Gracey’s “ruthless” and “overtly political” pacification campaign have long blamed him for standing in the way of what could have been peaceful progress to self-government.

  The Vietnamese path to independence, of shedding their submission to a European power, was long and bloody. The Vietnamese today speak of the First and the Second Indochina Wars—the first, pitting the Viet Minh against the French; the second, pitting Vietnam’s North against its South, with the Americans in this case heavily and vainly trying to keep the two young countries from becoming dominated by Communists. The fighting involved in both wars lasted for thirty years. The first war cost 500,000 Vietnamese lives and 90,000 French. The second resulted in more than 1 million North Vietnamese dead, 200,000 South Vietnamese, more than 58,000 Americans, and an assortment (Australian, Koreans, Thais) of more than 5,000 others. All told, well over 1.5 million Vietnamese died, and well over 160,000 Europeans and Americans—and in the end, the Indochinese were fully back in control of their own affairs.

  The way stations of the two conflicts are fading fast along history’s conveyor belt. Some of the names and events once so famed have receded with pitiless speed. Who now recalls Bao Dai, the perfumed and bejeweled final emperor of Annam, the last ruler of the Nguyen dynasty, who gave Vietnam its name and who was a puppet of the French, more famous in Monte Carlo than he ever was in the valleys of the Mekong or the Red River? What is now known of the Navarre Plan of 1953, a scheme by which the French had hoped to win back their influence from the guerrilla armies of the Viet Minh, and which was formally approved by the American headquarters in Hawaii? Do any now recall General Francis Brink, the Cornell-educated American infantryman who headed the first-ever U.S. Army headquarters in Saigon, established back in August 1950—and who shot himself an improbable three times in the chest in his office at the Pentagon because, the army said later, he was depressed? Questions about what drove him to his death—or of how anyone could shoot himself three times, anywhere—have surfaced now and then; but General Brink’s medical records were accidentally burned, and the suggestion that he stumbled on some misappropriation of funds or the smuggling of drugs, and was silenced, has been discounted and, like so much else from Vietnam, forgotten.