CHAPTER 4   

War

In July of 1937, Japanese and Chinese forces clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge that connected Peking to the Manchuria-China border. It was a small engagement, but it provided an excuse for the Japanese emperor to demand that China disengage from the area. (Many historians feel the incident was fabricated by the Japanese in order to instigate war.) When the Chinese refused to create a buffer zone in their territory, Japan bombed several cities and brought troops into China proper.

To the westerners partying all night in Shanghai, war still seemed very far away. The squabbling among the Asians mattered very little to the merchants and import-export mavens, so long as trade continued unabated. Writer Edgar Snow accused Americans in Shanghai of living in a “comfortable but hermetically sealed glass case.” Gould Hunter Thomas thought Shanghai was “a world unto itself. Many of the foreigners here seem to have lost their home ties. On the other hand, they know less about China and the Chinese than the person who stays home and reads about it.”

After touring Shanghai in this period, English writer Charles Isherwood pointed out that the bullets and artillery flying to the north had changed nothing in Shanghai:

The tired or lustful business man will find here everything to gratify his desires. You can buy an electric razor or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel, and gossip with Freddy Kaufmann, its charming manager, about the European aristocracy or pre-Hitler Berlin. You can attend race-meetings, baseball games, football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath-houses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea.… Finally, if you ever repent, there are churches and chapels of all denominations.

But in August of 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) was suddenly at the door, threatening to shatter the bubble encasing the Yanks and Brits in Shanghai. Attempts to defuse tensions after the Marco Polo Bridge incident failed, largely because of militarists in the Japanese high command. Full-scale fighting began in late July, and soon one million troops, backed by naval and airpower, were at the gates of Shanghai.

By late August, the Japanese had laid siege to the city. “People stood on their apartment roofs and watched Japanese dive bombers, right before their eyes, emptying tons of bombs on the Chinese trenches hidden beyond the horizon of tile and masonry,” wrote Snow. “Guests at the swank Park Hotel, in the security of Bubbling Well Road, could gaze out through the spacious glass facade of its top story dining room, while contentedly sipping their demitasse, and check up on the marksmanship of the Japanese batteries.” Many westerners, to whom the local Chinese population was invisible, were dismayed that the town’s hopping nightlife was besmirched. A reporter for Time pointed out, “The roulette tables at Joe Farren’s, the Park Hotel’s Sky Terrace, and Sir Victor Sassoon’s Tower Night Club had none of their old sparkle.”

The United States rushed in the 6th Marine Regiment to protect the American settlement in the city, and thousands of westerners were evacuated. Eventually, Chiang Kai-shek was forced to move his government west up the Yangtze, and the Japanese left a demolished, depopulated Shanghai in their wake, with an estimated two hundred thousand Chinese deaths (and nearly one hundred thousand more casualties).

Nanking, the nearby capital, was treated even worse. The infamous Rape of Nanking was an inhumane atrocity. “Wholesale looting, the violation of women, the murder of civilians, the eviction of Chinese from their homes, mass executions of war prisoners, and the impressing of able-bodied men turned Nanking into a city of terror,” wrote Frank Tillman Durdin in the New York Times just before he escaped the burning city. Another reporter who stayed in Nanking until the last possible moment was C. Yates McDaniel of the Associated Press. He wrote, “My last remembrance of Nanking: Dead Chinese, dead Chinese, dead Chinese.”

The Great Powers of the west were outraged and sent strong protests to Japan, but there was no response. The militarists pulling strings behind the emperor were not about to be dictated to by colonist powers an ocean away. So the fighting continued, and despite the wanton destruction of its cities and civilians, and despite being badly outgunned, the Chinese Army proved far tougher than the Japanese had anticipated. On the Yangtze, Judy and her fellow British and American gunboatmen found themselves in a difficult position. Their countries were not involved in the war, and the ships flying the Stars and Stripes and Union Jack remained untouched for the moment. But ignoring the carnage about them was hard, particularly because the sailors had grown close to the Chinese people, many of whom were now being killed by the Japanese.

For protection, the Gnat teamed up with an American gunboat, the USS Panay, to patrol the river. The Panay had come on station only a few years earlier, one of the new class of American gunboats that were larger and more heavily armed than her predecessors. Panay was too big to navigate the water where the huge gorges segmented the river, so she spent most of her time in the main channels between Shanghai and Hankow. This suited the crew just fine, for the good times on offer in those ports offset the fact that the Panay was a regular target for gunfire coming from trigger-happy locals, who either mistook the River Rats for the enemy or were overeager to protect their turf. The ship’s captain, Lieutenant Commander R. A. Dyer, reported that “firing on gunboats and merchant ships have [sic] become so routine that any vessel traversing the Yangtze River sails with the expectation of being fired upon. Fortunately, the Chinese appear to be rather poor marksmen and the ship has, so far, not sustained any casualties in these engagements.”

Not even the destruction going on downstream could keep the gunboatmen from their grog, and the crew prided themselves on being able to find fun no matter where they were docked for shore leave. The companies of the Panay and the Gnat got along very well, and early in their partnership they went out for some bonding in a small riverside village bar. After mass quantities of alcohol were consumed, the sailors stumbled back to their respective ships. Tankey Cooper was almost halfway up the gangway when he noticed Judy was missing.

He asked everyone who had been ashore if they had seen Judy since leaving the canteen. Then he asked everyone who had stayed on board. He radioed the Panay and asked them about the dog, who had instantly won over the Yank sailors as well. “No sign of her, sorry,” came the reply.

Against regulations, Cooper went back ashore and scoured the area, to no avail. He got no sleep that night and was still upset the next day when the “villager telegraph” sent word to Cooper: Judy was being held captive aboard the Panay after all.

Late that night, Cooper and another sailor took a sampan and crept up to the Panay’s rail. Showing the agility of the best pirates, they slipped on board the American vessel without being detected. After a few minutes, they returned, heavily laden, to the sampan, and silently made it back to the Gnat.

The next day, the Gnat received a signal from the Panay: “Boarded in the night by pirates. Ship’s bell stolen.”

The reply was swift: “We were also pirated—of Judy. Will swap one bell belonging to USS Panay for one lady named Judy, property of officers and ship’s company of HMS Gnat.”

The exchange was made within the hour. The point was made as well—no one dared abscond with such a beloved member of the Gnat’s crew.

Such revelry came to a halt a couple of weeks later, when the Japanese began attacking the gunboats in earnest. Nanking was in her death throes, and the last of the Chinese resistance fled the city on December 11. The worst of the atrocities followed in the wake of this collapse. The Panay was concerned with the fate of the American citizens still in the city. The gunboat signaled farewell to the Gnat, which went upriver to escort several cargo steamers. The Panay, amid mass chaos and with bombs dropping all around her, evacuated the fourteen remaining Americans from Nanking, including embassy staff. Also rescued was a pair of newsreel cameramen, Norman Alley of Universal News and Eric Mayell of Movietone News. Now under the direction of Lieutenant Commander James J. Hughes of New York, the Panay then sailed upriver several miles to safeguard the progress of three U.S. oil steamers carrying crude for Standard Oil (along with dozens of company employees fleeing Nanking).

On December 12, Japanese aircraft were ordered to attack “any and all ships” sailing the Yangtze above Nanking. This order was considered so aggressive that the navy, whose airplanes controlled the skies over the river, asked for it to be confirmed. “Bomb away” was the reply, and at about one thirty p.m., the sound of approaching aircraft was heard on the American ships. Judy was not on board to bark a warning that the inbounds were hostiles, but Lieutenant Commander Hughes assumed the large American flags painted on the white hull and bridge of the ship would protect them from any attacks.

Not so. The three Japanese bombers and nine fighters bombed and strafed the quartet of American ships with murderous intent. All four ships were sunk in the attack. Three crewmen of the Panay were killed and forty-three more were wounded, along with five of the civilians she was evacuating. The newsreel men captured dramatic footage of the attack and, after they had abandoned ship and been rowed ashore, the sinking of the Panay. The hulks of the vessels destroyed during the attack remained burning and visible along the shores of the great river for weeks.

Angry recrimination and negotiation followed. The Japanese accepted responsibility, though they claimed the attack was unintentional (two British merchant ships and two other British gunboats were fired upon the very same day, which made the “Who, us?” statements of the Japanese seem suspect). An indemnity of $2 million ($33.5 million in today’s cash) was paid to the United States, but the money did little to soothe frayed relations. Hostilities between Japan and America truly began that day.

This was the most stressful of several tense moments to follow between the invaders who wanted to exploit China and the western powers who claimed rights to be there. Japanese officers became a common sight aboard the Gnat and the other gunboats, particularly following any episodes where sailors intervened on behalf of the Chinese in one fashion or another. Judy often greeted these visiting Japanese with bared teeth and snarls, not having lost her anger for the people who had first treated her so badly back in Shanghai when she was a pup. It got so bad that Judy had to be confined belowdecks when a Japanese representative came aboard.

The Panay bombing and the tensions that followed were both a fitting end to what had been a fraught 1937 and a sharp foreshadowing of the devastation that was to come in the near future. In some respects, the eventual atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came as a direct result of the sinking of the Panay. But the full-scale war that sucked the western allies into the Pacific conflict was still over the horizon. In the meantime, Judy would take advantage of the relative peace that existed to follow her natural instincts.