The next morning Imperial Japanese warships anchored off the Bund. The warships of the other imperial powers, also anchored there, ignored them. As did their ambassadors and embassy officials.
Except the Italian consul-general who, as the Japanese naval officers stepped ashore on the Bund, was standing there in full plumaged regalia to greet them. He shook their hands heartily and congratulated them on their victory, then made a florid and very lengthy speech.
As Japanese troops marched into the city, Italian soldiers posted in the Italian Embassy deployed on either side of the street and as the Japanese marched between them they snapped their heels and gave the full fascist salute. White Russian dancing girls and prostitutes and bartenders, including Ralph Shaw’s ex-squeeze Big Wanda, stood cheering them on the street and handing out free cigarettes to them.
There were not as many atrocities in Wuhan as there had been in Nanking or Shanghai. This was partly because the worldwide condemnation of these massacres had startled the Japanese. (Isn’t this how imperial powers always behave?) But it was also because the Japanese High Command had realized that now, being in the middle of China instead of on its fringes, involved in what was going to be at best a protracted war and being surrounded by hostile countryside, they were going to have to treat the Chinese with a certain, albeit very low, level of humanity.
So there was comparatively little killing of civilians within Wuhan.
The defeated soldiers were a different matter. Several thousands were captured as the city was taken. Wounded ones were despatched immediately.
The rest were marched to the Bund’s quayside. There some were used for bayonet practice, but most were driven out onto the long wooden pontoons floating in the river where they stood and were used as target practice and machine-gunned down until they were all dead. Their corpses floated downstream til they started to bob and knock against the hulls of the other nations’ warships moored downstream.
‘Look,’ they seemed to say. ‘Today it is us. Tomorrow it will be you.’
All the warships’ crews had been sent below and the hatches battened down.
One junior officer was left on the bridge of each ship.
*
Aboard the British gunboat, HMS Ladybird, was a young British squaddie, Howard Andrews, posted to the British Embassy but sent on an errand to the Ladybird and caught there when the Japanese started machine-gunning their prisoners. He was sent below with the naval crew. They were able to witness the butchery through a porthole.
Howard, who was quite political, did not like fascism. He didn’t like the Japanese – but he liked Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels even less, they being closer to his home and family. So, being a spirited lad, he started to think what he himself, post-Munich, might do to fight back now that his government had proved so passive and cowardly. He had a sudden idea. To rally people – not with political speeches, but with songs.
Even though the Sikh military band attached to the embassy was pretty rubbish, he enjoyed marching to ‘Colonel Bogey’. It had swing, swagger. It made you feel good.
Howard liked words. Liked using them, liked writing them down. He started to compose a ditty.
How do you hit fascism below the belt? Where it really hurts? In the short and curlies? Then the magical words started to arrive… About Hitler. And his testicular shortcomings.