In September 1942 the Japanese dismantled what the Shanghai Times called the ‘last symbol of Anglo-US despotism’ in Shanghai, the statue of the former inspector-general of the Chinese Maritime Customs, Sir Robert Hart.1 They also destroyed the memorial on the Bund to the Allied dead of the First World War, a strange gesture since they, after all, had been part of the victorious coalition in that war. There were other indications of the end of Anglo-Saxon predominance. The stock of American films, which continued to be shown in Shanghai during the first year of the occupation, began to run down in late 1942. Thereafter, cinema-goers had to make do mainly with Chinese, Japanese and Soviet films. The Grand was reduced to staging ‘Chow and Chow, the Whistling Ventriloquists’. These tokens of a new cultural order were the prelude to a diplomatic revolution: the end of the foreign concessions in Shanghai.
The Japanese and the Allies, alike anxious to pose as supporters of legitimate Chinese nationalism, engaged in a curious diplomatic race to surrender the foreign enclaves to their respective Chinese protégés. On 9 January 1943 the Wang Ching-wei régime declared war on Britain and the United States. In return, the Japanese signed a convention formally committing themselves to the abrogation of extraterritorial privileges and the restoration to China of Japanese concessions, of the international settlements at Shanghai and Kulangsu and of the legation quarter in Peking. Two days later the British and the Americans, who had announced in October 1942 that they would begin negotiations with the Chinese on the return of the foreign concessions, signed treaties to that effect with the Chinese. The Japanese press scoffed at these agreements as empty gestures and took the opportunity to sneer: ‘Gone today are the Liddells, the Brownes, the Smythes of the Shanghai Municipal Council and the Shanghai Municipal Police. Gone also are Taipans Mitchell, Keswick and their breed, gone on the evacuation boats that carried them back to their home countries.’2 On 14 March 1943 the Japanese Prime Minister, General Tojo, visited Shanghai and publicly stressed that Japan really intended to return all the foreign enclaves to China.
In Shanghai, the French Concession was the first to disappear. In the early months of the occupation the Japanese had left the concession more or less to its own devices. Although they had obtained the French consul-general’s agreement in principle to the stationing of Japanese gendarmes in the concession, they did not immediately exercise this right. When they did so in early 1942, only a tiny token unit was installed. In April that year, however, the Japanese consul-general, Horiuchi, presented his French colleague with the demand for a more substantial Japanese presence. Margerie believed that the pressure emanated from the Japanese army, an impression that Horiuchi and the Japanese Gendarmerie chief encouraged by hinting that they were more sympathetic to the French point of view. Together with his police chief, L. Fabre, Margerie stalled for ten days, but eventually they were compelled to yield. Margerie consoled himself with some minor Japanese concessions such as a promise that the Japanese would not parade in uniform in the streets and an undertaking that the new arrangement would not be made public. These titbits Margerie attributed to the ‘relations of confidence we have been able to establish with the [Japanese] Consulate-General and the Gendarmerie’.3 The agreement did not take effect until July, when 150 Japanese gendarmes were installed at a post on the Avenue Pétain. Meanwhile, parades and inspections of the French police and military units were orchestrated in a pathetic effort to assert what was left of French pride.
In February 1943 the Vichy French reluctantly announced that they would relinquish their extraterritorial judicial rights and hand over all their concessions in China to the Wang Ching-wei régime. These decisions would be put into effect ‘as soon as it will be found possible’.4 Talks opened in Shanghai in May between the French and Wang’s foreign minister, resulting in an agreement on the handover to the Chinese of the French concessions at Tientsin, Hankow and Canton.5 The greatest prize came last. The formal ‘rendition’ of the concession in Shanghai finally took place on 30 July 1943.
The end of the little French foothold in Shanghai had both local and international consequences. Fabre, perhaps ashamed of his role in these transactions and regretful that he had not joined those of his men who had rallied to de Gaulle in 1940, committed suicide a few weeks later.6 The Vichy government’s decision to hand over their concessions to Wang Ching-wei provoked outrage on the part of the Chungking government. Although the French Ambassador, Henri Cosme, was accredited to the Wang régime, the Vichy authorities had hedged their bets by maintaining a senior representative, Jean Paul-Boncour, at Chungking. When news of the Vichy-Wang agreement arrived there, Paul-Boncour was summoned to receive ‘the most emphatic protest possible in diplomatic language’; he suffered the further sanction of being excluded from a number of diplomatic functions.7 Beyond that only one recourse remained to the Chiang Kai-shek government: in August 1943 they severed relations with Vichy and a few weeks later recognized the French Committee of National Liberation as the legitimate government of France. The one-armed, Russian-born, naturalized Frenchman, General Zinodi Pechkoff (adoptive son of Maxim Gorki), was appointed de Gaulle’s personal representative in Free China soon afterwards.
The rendition of the concession was succeeded two days later by the return of the International Settlement to nominal Chinese authority almost exactly a century after its foundation. The retrocession took place on the basis of an agreement between the Japanese and Chinese (Wang Ching-wei) governments – though the authority of the former to grant it and of the latter to receive it were equally questionable.8 The Shanghai Municipal Council was abolished and its functions and assets were taken over by the puppet régime. The administrations of the former foreign areas were united with those of the Chinese municipality in a single city government. The police forces of all three areas were also amalgamated, although the separate existence and the uniquely valuable file collection of the Foreign Affairs Section (former Special Branch) of the Municipal Police were maintained throughout the Japanese occupation. The Shanghai Volunteer Corps had already been disbanded in September 1942 ‘in view of the present circumstances’ – though the Municipal Gazette announced that former members would be permitted to continue to use its dining room.9 On 2 August 1943 the Japanese chairman of the Municipal Council formally handed over the settlement to the mayor of the pro-Wang Chinese municipal government. Later the same day ‘President’ Wang Ching-wei addressed a celebratory meeting at the Grand Theatre. Wang declared that Anglo-American ‘economic exploitation and cultural anaesthesia’ had made China ‘fall deep into spiritual and material slumber’. With Japan’s assistance, ‘the accumulated evils of a hundred years’ had now been swept away.10 The Shanghai Times rejoiced, calling the retrocession ‘the most impressive event of the present century’.11
In reality, of course, ultimate power, after the renditions as before, remained in the hands of the Japanese. The occupiers retained control of the municipal prison and reserved their position on the issue of extraterritorial rights, including freedom from taxation, of Japanese citizens. In the First District (the former settlement and two adjacent areas) nine out of the top 20 officials and 12 out of the top 20 police officers were still Japanese, generally titled ‘advisers’ to department chiefs.12 But if the Japanese gesture in returning the concessions was hollow and hypocritical, the same might be said of the almost simultaneous undertaking by the British and Americans to return their concessions to the Chungking government. They, after all, had already been ejected from all of them and were merely recognizing, ex post facto, and not altogether willingly, an uncomfortable reality – without paying any immediate price at all, since Chiang Kai-shek was in no position to exercise his newly recognized rights.
Further symbolic steps followed. In August 1943 the French Club, which had already excluded British and American members, announced that it would admit Chinese citizens to membership for the first time since its foundation in 1905.13 To coincide with the ‘double tenth’ celebrations on 10 October 1943, English and French street names were sinicized: Avenue Edward VII became Great Shanghai Road; Avenue Haig became Hua Shang Road; Broadway became Ta Ming Road; and Jessfield Road became Fan Huang Tu Road.
The demise of the concessions was seen as an Axis diplomatic triumph. But hardly had the Wang authorities assumed the cloak of authority in Shanghai than the Axis coalition began to crumble. The publication on 8 September 1943 of the Italian armistice agreement with the Allies had immediate local consequences. The Japanese denounced the decision as a betrayal and took reprisals against Italians in Shanghai. Hitherto regarded as friendly citizens of an Allied power, they suddenly found themselves placed in the same category as British, American and other enemy aliens. The San Marco Battalion of Italian Marines, the diplomatic and consular staff, as well as all Italian civilians, were now liable for internment. Most were rounded up and placed in camps.
Within a matter of weeks, a dramatic reversal occurred. Following Mussolini’s escape from custody and his proclamation of the ‘Italian Social Republic’ under German protection in North Italy, the Japanese government, on 28 September 1943, recognized his new régime as the legitimate government of Italy. Wang Ching-wei followed suit two days later. Consequently some diehards, among them the consul-general in Shanghai, Pagano di Melito, pledged their continued support to the Duce. On 12 December 1943 more than 2,000 born-again fascists assembled at the grounds of the Nagai Cotton Mill to receive ‘liberation certificates’ marking their release from internment. After an address by the Japanese Consul-General and a speech by Lieutenant-Commander Bordandini Baldassarri, chairman of the Provisional Italian Committee, the crowd gave the fascist salute.
The Italian Ambassador, Marchese Taliani de Marchio, was one of the few who refused to take the oath of allegiance to Mussolini’s rump republic. He and his wife were interned, at first in a pleasant house on Kinnear Road, later in less comfortable quarters at 121 Rubicon Road, where they were compelled to do manual labour. ‘One of our guards was crazy’, the ex-ambassador recalled after the war, ‘and the other two were always drunk.’ On one occasion, the Marchesa, a niece of the former Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef, was knocked down by a Japanese guard. She slapped him in the face. Another time all three guards got drunk and the ‘crazy’ one waved his samurai sword before Taliani’s face several times as if to slash him. In the end the swordsman sliced his own foot severely, resulting in a two-month stay in hospital.14
Another visible sign of the Italian collapse was the decision by the sailors on the Conte Verde to prevent their ship being sequestered by the Japanese navy. The Lloyd Trestino liner had been lying idle in Shanghai harbour since the outbreak of the Pacific War, except for her voyage to Lourenço Marques when she carried American civilian exchangees accompanied by Japanese officers. At 7.00 a.m. on 9 September 1943, the crew scuttled the ship within sight of Americans held in the Pootung internment camp. The 615-ton Italian river gunboat Lepanto was also sunk. For months the two hulks lay overturned side by side in shallow water opposite the Bund. The crews of both ships as well as of another Italian gunboat, Carlotta, were all interned.
The Italian surrender had untoward consequences for the German intelligence effort in Shanghai. The Ehrhardt bureau had hitherto relied on the Italian radio station in Peking for transmission of messages to and from Berlin. Ehrhardt failed to secure permission from the Japanese to operate a station in Shanghai, though he was eventually permitted to do so in Canton. But there were long delays in setting up the Canton transmitter. Scheduled to become operational on 24 July 1944, it actually started working only in October. It turned out in any case to be of little use to Ehrhardt, since outgoing telegrams had to be relayed from Shanghai to Canton by ‘air mail’, which took up to three weeks. Incoming telegrams arrived by the same slow route. These delays were aggravated by errors in calculating the time difference between Berlin and Canton. Moreover, some messages had to be repeated more than 20 times because of inaudibility, leading to complaints that such repetition offered the Allies obvious interception possibilities.
The disintegration of the Axis was compounded by Japanese requisitions of German firms in Shanghai. The German High Command was so incensed at the ‘unintelligible attitude’ of their ally on this issue that inquiries were ordered into whether there had been similar German requisitions of Japanese firms in German-occupied territory in Europe that might be used as a bargaining counter in negotiations with Japan.15
On the other side of the lines, the Allied coalition in China also cracked at its joints. In August 1943 the heads of SOE and OSS, Hambro and Donovan, loosened the bonds of their ‘treaty’ of the previous year. The British predominance for operations out of India and the American for those based in China was reaffirmed. But the ‘ungentlemanly warfare’ chiefs agreed that too hard and fast a delineation of spheres of subversive operations was undesirable. OSS in India and SOE in China would now be permitted to establish such organizations as were necessary for their work – so long as it was with the full knowledge and consent of the other partner.16 The vague elasticity of this new formulation engendered even more inter-Allied bickering than the rigidity of the old one. One historian comments that ‘this was a charter of equal misery’ for both the British and the American commanders in the Far East.17 Both sides broke the agreement. In China, in particular, the British refused to restrict their activities to a purely intelligence-gathering role. Nor would they fully inform the Americans what they were up to. The British SIS representative in New Delhi was not far off the mark in 1944 in suggesting that the ‘treaty’, in fact, ‘was never implemented’.18
In the final year of the war the British inaugurated a Chinese counter-espionage unit based in India. The organization took shape under the combined auspices of SOE and the DIB, the Indian government equivalent of MI5. Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Bourne, former head of the Shanghai Municipal Police, was appointed to take charge of this new ‘China Intelligence Section’. Bourne operated under the nominal direction of the security control branch of the Calcutta Police but worked secretly with SOE. Bourne’s organization was known by the code name ‘BRISTOL’.19 Its main objects were to ensure the loyalty of SOE’s Chinese agents and to prevent leakage of SOE’s operational plans. Agents of ‘Bristol’ were to be infiltrated into ‘the principal Chinese areas in India where intelligence regarding Chinese underground activities could be obtained’. The DIB agreed to pay for administrative costs, provided SOE covered agents’ salaries. The DIB ‘also made a grant towards a bribery fund’. By August 1945 Bourne had hired five full-time agents and two sub-agents. ‘Bristol’ gradually extended its field of activity. Like the old Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch, ‘Bristol’ acquired ‘elements of both an intelligence and a criminal investigation bureau’, acting as an internal check on SOE’s Chinese agents and as a general watchdog for ‘suspected Chinese political agents’, smuggling and cross-border criminal activity.20
By the last months of the war, suspicions between the main British and American intelligence organizations in China had reached paranoid levels. On one occasion an OSS official told Donovan that he had obtained possession of a document proving ‘that one of the British missions in the China Theatre is here to penetrate for counter-espionage purposes OSS and American Army and Air Force units’.21 On another, the American commander in China complained to the head of the British Military Mission about reports that the British had plans ‘to arm 30,000 Chinese bandits’.22
The Americans not only fell out with the British. They also quarrelled bitterly with one another. Although the OSS Director of Operations in China, Milton Miles, was formally subordinated to Tai Li, his real loyalty was supposed (by the Americans) to be to OSS. In fact, he refused to obey orders from Donovan and, when the OSS chief tried to bring him into line, Miles used his influence in the navy in Washington to maintain his independence.23 SACO, as a result, remained virtually a law unto itself. Miles was said to boast of how he attended political trials with Tai Li at the end of which the accused were buried alive. General Stilwell accused Miles of making secret arms deals with Tai Li. And both Stilwell and Donovan despaired that Miles had fallen totally under the spell of his Chinese friend, virtually emasculating the entire American subversive effort in the country. In November 1944 Donovan complained bitterly to the White House that the Chinese had opposed every effort of OSS to establish itself in China.24
The dissension in the Allied camp was visible in Sino-American relations, above all, and culminated in a severe crisis at the summit of power. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s blunt manner and his presumptuous insistence that he knew better than Chiang Kai-shek how to organize the Chinese army deeply affronted the Chinese leader. The two men conceived a profound mutual loathing and Stilwell even discussed with Roosevelt plans for Chiang’s assassination – at what level of seriousness is unknown.25 In October 1944 Chiang finally lost patience with Stilwell and ordered him out of the country. His successor as American commander in China, General Albert C. Wedemeyer, was more diplomatic in handling his hosts, but he too complained that SACO amounted to a private army. He told the head of the British Military Mission, Major-General Grimsdale, in December 1944, that he had ‘General Marshall working on the US Navy Department to clean this up’.26
OSS could nevertheless claim some noteworthy achievements. SACO succeeded in establishing several guerrilla camps behind Japanese lines, one just 200 miles south-west of Shanghai. If Miles’s account is to be believed, SACO was responsible for more than 20,000 Japanese killed in the course of 1,326 separate actions between 1943 and 1945.27 But Miles almost certainly exaggerated the achievements of his organization.28
Only one operation of any consequence was carried out in Shanghai. On 4 May 1944, a bomb exploded on the fourteenth floor of the Park Hotel. In earlier days the hotel had been a favourite rendezvous for Nazis in Shanghai, but Gerda Kocher, Ludwig Ehrhardt’s secretary, grumbled that after the outbreak of the Pacific War ‘Japs poured in and decent foreigners moved out’. The Japanese took a particular liking to the restaurant on the fourteenth floor. Kocher recollected with disgust that the place became ‘overcrowded with Japs, often drunk, in slippers and dangling suspenders’.29 The bomb killed several Japanese officials.
One common objective of British and American subversive organizations was creating effective escape channels for Allied servicemen in China. The most spectacular escape was engineered in October 1944 from Ward Road Prison in Shanghai by Lieutenant-Commander Columbus Darwin Smith, whose ship, the USS Wake, had been captured off the Bund on the first day of the Pacific War. He made his getaway together with an American marine corporal and a British naval officer. It was the first successful escape from the prison on record. The two officers had been imprisoned together in a cell which had steel bars on the window and door. The cell was 25 feet above the inner garden of the prison. The men planned their break-out carefully with the aid of outside confederates who managed to throw hacksaw blades over the outer prison wall in a bamboo tube. The escapers made ropes out of canvas sheets. They wove 12-foot poles out of thousands of bamboo sticks brought in supposedly to support string beans in the prison’s vegetable garden. Using the hacksaw blades they sawed through the cell bars. They clambered over the outer prison wall with the aid of the ropes and poles. When they got to the top of the wall they found, to their horror, that the street below was crowded with Chinese and also some Japanese. ‘It was a lovely fall evening,’ Smith later recalled, ‘and I never saw so many Chinese in one place. We were scared to death – after being so successful that far. Honestly we were horrified at that point, but we couldn’t go back at that stage so we boldly piled down the rope one after another, landing on schedule at 22.30 amid gasping Chinese.’30 Then they melted into the crowd and bolted. Although they held no identification papers and were unable to change out of their prison clothes, they succeeded miraculously in passing unchallenged through several Japanese checkpoints. During the night and early morning they walked 24 miles, reaching the hills near Shanghai. The Japanese placed a price of US$1 million on Smith’s head but none of the Chinese peasants the escapers met betrayed them. Eventually they encountered guerrillas under the control of Tai Li. With their help, they made their way to unoccupied China where Smith joined SACO.
In early 1945 the Americans took steps to tighten control of OSS operations in China and to weaken Tai Li’s authority over it. By the summer the number of OSS operatives in China had greatly expanded and the organization’s geographical reach was extended. One OSS intelligence team succeeded in penetrating Shanghai. Agents obtained the code used by the Japanese navy operating in Shanghai waters. The X-2 (counter-intelligence) branch of OSS in China built up a master file of 15,000 ‘black’ names of enemy agents and suspects which led to the arrest of several of these at the end of the war.
As the struggle for mastery in East Asia moved towards a climax, members of the foreign criminal underworld in Shanghai began to reorganize their affairs. ‘Captain’ Pick, ever on the look-out for new opportunities, embarked on a new venture. In June 1944 he set out from Shanghai for the Philippines on a mission for the Japanese Naval Intelligence Bureau. His nominal controller, whom he manipulated with consummate skill, was Ikushima Kichizo, a civilian employee of the section. An episcopal Christian who had studied at Amherst College in Massachusetts and Cambridge University in England, Ikushima had served as a dean at a university in Kyoto. Pick was accompanied by a motley gang of adventurers and desperadoes from Shanghai. These included his sidekick Morris Gershkovitch, his enforcer the boxer Paul Lojnikoff, a Portuguese black-marketeer, Francisco Carneiro, who had served as Lojnikoff’s manager, and ‘Princess’ Sumaire’s Italian lawyer, Dr Terni.
Another of the group was even more closely connected to the Maharajah’s daughter. Among the guests at Sumaire’s much-publicized party in the Park Hotel in December 1941 had been a Japanese playboy, Takami Morihiko (‘Mori’ to his friends). Takami was an American as well as a Japanese citizen. A dark-skinned, square-jawed, bearded young man, well-built and of medium height, he was said to look ‘more Hawaiian or Filipino than Japanese’.31 Like Sumaire and other members of her circle, Takami had a weakness for spurious titles: he called himself a ‘count’, though he was rumoured to be the son of a pharmacist in Yokohama. In fact, he had been born in New York in 1914, son of a Japanese-American doctor who was head of the city’s Japanese residents’ association. He was educated at an expensive private school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and spent one year at Amherst College. In 1935 he went to Japan, where he enjoyed the patronage of Count Kabayama Aisuko (hence perhaps his pretensions to a title of his own). Two years later was conscripted into the Japanese army, in which he served until December 1940. Apparently in order to avoid further service in the regular armed forces, he then moved to Shanghai, where he joined the civilian staff of the Japanese Naval Intelligence Bureau.
In April 1943 Sumaire, who had still not divorced her husband in India, married Takami in a ‘swank’ ceremony at the Park Hotel. The marriage was played up as a sign of Indo-Japanese amity. Takami’s employers presented the couple with a lavish wedding present: a villa, formerly inhabited by Americans, at 279 Route Culty in the French Concession. Ensconced in her new home, Sumaire became a hostess in grand style. Champagne and black caviar were staples of her parties. Guests were mainly German and Japanese as well as officials of the Wang Ching-wei puppet régime and White Russian and other collaborators.
But Sumaire’s second marriage was short-lived. She discovered that her husband had long been enjoying an affair with Marquita Kwong, mistress of the Chinese-American collaborationist broadcaster Hubert Moy. Sumaire and her husband quarrelled frequently and he was said to have beaten her out of the house on several occasions – but she always returned for lack of money. Before his departure for the Philippines with the Pick gang, Takami had a long discussion with his wife in which they considered divorce.
Pick assembled some supplementary personnel for his Manila expedition. These included Hans Egon Fritz Arnheim (or Aronheim), known as Hans Fritz, an Austrian-Jewish refugee and former newspaperman, who had somehow acquired a Swiss passport. Once an informer for the Vienna police, he had been a petty crook in Shanghai. He worked for Pick as ‘informer-secretary-valet-stooge’ and was assigned to watch Swiss and Germans as well as Jewish refugees.32 Two Russian youths came along to work as radio technicians. One of these was Vyacheslav Toropovsky, stepson of James Smart, former head of the British wireless monitoring station in Shanghai.
On 15 June 1944 the Manila Tribune carried the following news report:
Group of Third Party Aliens Now in Manila
Several neutral foreigners who, since the outbreak of the GEA [Great East Asia] War have been living in various parts of the Southern regions, arrived in Manila recently, according to authoritative sources. It is understood that they will proceed to their destination after brief sojourn here. The matter was made public to prevent any groundless rumors suggesting that the visitors are prisoners of war or internees.
Over the next few months, wild rumours nevertheless circulated in Shanghai and Manila about the objects of the expedition and the fate of the group. One account even had it that they had all ‘been executed [recruited?] by USSR OGPU for espionage work’.33
The chief ostensible purpose of the journey was to uncover links between foreign nationals in the Philippines and the local resistance movement. No doubt the expertise in handling foreign civilian affairs that Pick and his companions had acquired in Shanghai recommended them to the Japanese for this task. Little was achieved in that connection, although a few unwary traders in arms, radios and other forbidden materials were entrapped and punished. Arvid Falk Jensen, a Danish gunrunner, was caught, arrested and apparently killed while in custody. An Irish priest, Father Kelly, who had smuggled goods and medicines to American internees, was also captured and, according to one account, ‘crucified by the Japanese’.34 The reports of these two cases, however, are found in post-war interrogations of Filipino witnesses and are not corroborated by other evidence. Almost the only useful work of the group was performed by the two young Russians, whose radio monitoring station intercepted US naval communications. If Toropovsky’s own post-war account is to be believed, they also picked up messages enabling them to anticipate American air raid targets in Manila and even to forecast correctly on 16 October 1944 that the Americans would shortly be landing somewhere in the Philippines – but the Japanese, Toropovsky relates, considered such reports ‘dangerous thoughts’ and refused to act on them. Since their warnings were largely ignored, the radio operators relaxed their efforts and did not even bother to maintain their expensive equipment. They used their Packard Bell disk recorder ‘mainly for recording the hit parade’.35
Behind the officially sanctioned intelligence purpose of the expedition was its real, quasi-criminal objective, which was the establishment of an import-export link between the Philippines and Shanghai for manufactured goods that were in short supply at either end. The first cargo of such goods was transported with the gang’s luggage aboard a boat that sailed from Shanghai on 10 June 1944. It carried 50 crates of Ruby Queen cigarettes, 40 of medicines, and a large quantity of office equipment. A load of electric light bulbs arrived from Shanghai and a cargo of Manila hemp rope and other products was sent in the other direction from Manila.
Having arrived in Manila, the gang took advantage of the opportunity to combine business with pleasure. They spent most of their time in nightclubs, gambling, smoking Ruby Queen cigarettes and associating with local women. The first night, Takami, dressed in a sharkskin suit, went downtown. ‘Paul Lojnikoff headed for the night clubs the day after we arrived’, recalled one of his companions.36 Among the gang’s favourite haunts were the Gastronome tearoom, the Torino café and the ‘69 Club’. Pick was particularly fond of the Gastronome because the juke-box there had a record of him singing that he liked to show off to acquaintances. In their off-duty hours in Manila bars, the gang members spoke with surprising freedom about their activities, avowing openly their connections with the Japanese authorities. They told some people that they were working as purchasing agents for the Japanese navy; others that they had been sent to Manila ‘to learn what former American property was then in the hands of Filipinos and neutral aliens’. Gershkovitch said that he was a British citizen ‘but he hated the British because they had treated him badly’.37 From time to time they reported Filipinos to the Japanese authorities for minor offences. So far as can be judged, their victims were mainly small fry such as the proprietor of the Empire State Cleaners on Mabini Street. The gang’s investigations appear to have developed into a protection racket: in return for payments, Pick and his associates would undertake not to report miscreants.
Soon after their arrival, Lojnikoff took up with an ‘actress’, Españita de Vidal, who was working in the Royal Room at the Avenue Hotel. One of the gang’s Russian radio operators recalled:
I doubt if Paul knew what he was doing, but he certainly struck oil when he met this Jane. It seems she knew every man worth knowing in the Philippine Islands, all the way from Manuel Quezon down through the Chief of the Manila Constabulary … and all the rest of Insular Society. Her husband seemed to be no obstacle to her in her jaunts with many of these men. She knew José P. Laurel and Ambassador Vargas, and she often played ‘madame’ for them, pimping out sweet young things from Manila’s better families and introducing them to the ‘fathers of the country’. This is what Lojnikoff made gee-gee eyes at, as he sat at a table in the Royal Room. Pretty soon he had Españita handing him information by the ream. He didn’t understand half of what was in them, but anyway passed them on to Ikushima.38
In return for the information, the boxer ‘provided Mrs de Vidal with protection from unsympathetic Filipinos’.39
In mid-June 1944 a meeting took place in a house near the Malacañang Palace between the gang and their Japanese controller, Ikushima. The encounter took place in the residence of the Japanese naval attaché, formerly the compound of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Ikushima told them that the Filipinos seemed to he adapting poorly to the Co-Prosperity Sphere. The gang was instructed to investigate the causes of disaffection. They were also ‘to study the other nationals in the Philippines, to learn what their sympathies were’ and to search out corruption in public utilities.
On 8 August 1944 Pick left Manila, complaining of bad health, and returned to Shanghai. He seems to have taken with him much of the money allocated for salary payments to his colleagues. Lojnikoff now ‘set himself up as head of the group’, but the boxer lacked Pick’s magnetic authority and the gang soon began to fall apart. Gershkovitch, who later complained that Lojnikoff had ‘bullied him continually’, spent most of his time in the ‘69 Club’. On one occasion he went to Tom’s Dixie Inn to collect some money that Lojnikoff explained was a ‘commission on a business deal’. Lojnikoff and Carneiro ‘spoke deprecatingly’ of Gershkovitch who looked ‘ragged and poor’ in contrast to the prosperous appearance of the other gang members.40 Lojnikoff continued blackmailing activities and accumulated a considerable fortune. The gang also branched out into other enterprises. At one point Carneiro and Lojnikoff purchased some industrial diamonds – or rather took them and promised to pay later (the money was never forthcoming). They also tried to buy and sell guns and ammunition.
By late 1944 it was plain that an American landing on the main Philippine island, Luzon, was imminent. Leaving Gershkovitch and Takami behind to fend for themselves, Lojnikoff and the others left Manila on 24 December 1944, two weeks before the Americans landed.
In Takami’s absence, Sumaire had encountered money problems. For a time she survived by selling furniture and other personal effects. From December 1944 Ikushima arranged for her to receive a stipend of 50,000 Chinese dollars a month from the Japanese Navy Office. In letters from Manila, Takami insisted that he still loved her. As proof of his continued devotion, he sent her several presents with returning gang members, including a leather suitcase in the lining of which he had concealed ten bars of silver which she was able to sell for a high price. The suitcase also contained 24 yards of sharkskin, six pairs of nylon stockings and a box of cigars (a gift for a German-Brazilian acquaintance). Sumaire, however, had lost interest in Takami. She sought consolation from a number of other men – and, it appears, women. ‘Subject’, noted a post-war American intelligence report, ‘in her pursuit of happiness, has often been physically intimate with both sexes concurrently. She evidently runs the gamut of perversion since she had also been known to be both sadistically and masochistically inclined.’41 Her women-friends included Margot Chan (alias Nakamura) ‘who recently owned the shortlived Donald Duck Bar on Yu Yuen Road’ and Lydia Milanowska, estranged wife of a German, Karl Munz, ‘who was suspected of having been in the employ of the German Gestapo in Shanghai’.42 Sumaire also had a long and stormy relationship with a journalist, Roger Pierard, who had been in charge of propaganda in Egal’s Free French movement in Shanghai in 1940–41. Pierard had earlier been arrested and tortured by the Japanese and sentenced to two years in prison.43 Sumaire was later accused of having collected compromising information on Pierard with which she blackmailed him. She developed other liaisons with an escaped German prisoner-of-war and a French-Chinese, Vincent Tang, ‘described as the Number One man of the French Club’. According to the same American report, Sumaire lived from early 1945 until the Japanese surrender ‘as mistress of Sasaki, a Japanese big shot of whom it was said that he could send anybody to Bridge House’.44
Shanghai had always been notorious as a refuge for renegades, black sheep and bad hats. But the topsy-turvy morality of occupation seemed to dredge the worst human filth out of the mud of the Whangpoo. Sumaire and her friends were only the most visible examples of a general collapse of standards of decency in a city never celebrated for decorum. A Chinese doctor from Shanghai, who reached Kunming in unoccupied China in May 1944, sought to convey to Allied interrogators some sense of the contaminated social climate of the city: ‘The whole moral construction of the people of Shanghai is undermined. Everywhere and in all walks of life extortion, corruption, bribery and blackmail exist.’45 In this atmosphere, concepts such as resistance and collaboration were almost emptied of meaning and the most elaborate urban society in China was reduced to the morality of the jungle.
The later part of the war was a grim period in Shanghai. Rationing was extended to salt, soap and matches and permitted quantities diminished. The short-sighted Japanese economic policies of plunder and expropriation reduced Shanghai’s manufacturing production by early 1945 to barely a quarter of its 1937 level. As the transportation and supply system crumbled, food shortages in the city became acute and prices soared. Money became worthless and gold the favoured store of value.
On the night of 9/10 June 1944 the first Allied air raid of the war hit Shanghai. Another followed on 5 July, a third four days later. After a further raid in November, electricity could be provided only for a few hours in the evening. Much of what remained of Shanghai’s industrial production was paralyzed. In the following months many of the raids took place in daylight, carried out by large US super-fortress bombers.
Meanwhile the decline in the military and political might of the Third Reich began to have ripple effects in the Far East. When the Abwehr chief, Admiral Canaris, was implicated in the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, his intelligence agency was taken over by Himmler’s SS. This institutional rivalry was reflected in Shanghai in relations between the Ehrhardt Bureau and the Gestapo organization headed by Meisinger. Ehrhardt was instructed by Berlin to place his bureau under Meisinger’s orders. He contrived to comply nominally, while secretly maintaining the independence of his organization. He was assisted in this manoeuvre by the Japanese, with whom he was by now on better terms and who were highly suspicious of Meisinger.
After the war Ehrhardt described this episode to American interrogators:
After the plot against the Fuehrer’s life on Ju[ly] 20, 1944, Gestapo pressure again increased and developed into a planned inveiglement campaign of all party circles with the object of my deposition … Due to the excessive indecency of these intrigues I … refused any kind of capitulation and determined to see the fight through. The Japanese got wind of these internal events and got so worked up over the unjustified and dirty manner of the attacks on me that I had considerable difficulty in restraining them from taking independent action against the slanderers. Such action could have been used as the basis for justifiable accusations of disloyalty against me.46
In December 1944 Meisinger and Huber visited the Japanese General Staff in Tokyo and asked that they be recognized as having authority over Ehrhardt. According to Ehrhardt’s later account, the Japanese refused and declared that they had full confidence in Ehrhardt, whereas they did not have the same confidence in Huber. The Japanese threatened that if the German High Command insisted on subordinating Ehrhardt to Huber, they would prohibit any German military information activities whatsoever in territories under their control.
Shortly thereafter, Ehrhardt received ‘strict orders from Berlin’ to undertake ‘collaboration’ with Huber, for which purpose a supplementary budget of RM5,000 was placed at his disposal. His position strengthened by Japanese support and by control of this budget, Ehrhardt found that Huber, on his return from Tokyo, adopted a new tack:
For the first time in several years, he paid me a visit and, in a relatively decent and straightforward manner, gave the following explanation. He had been to Tokyo to participate in a conference on the subject of my deposition and the takeover of the [Ehrhardt Bureau] by the Gestapo. However, it had been found that most of the accusations against me were unfounded. He sincerely regretted having participated in this action and tendered his formal apologies.
Ehrhardt accepted Huber’s apology and the two agreed to cooperate henceforth.
The touching reconciliation was only paper-thin. In January 1945 the two met again to discuss cooperation in counter-espionage work. Ehrhardt rejected Huber’s request for office space at his bureau’s building on Ferry Road. He nevertheless agreed to provide RM5,000 funding for counter-espionage work to be conducted under the direction of Huber by an agent called Marcs. This man played skat with Huber, but Ehrhardt considered him loyal to the Abwehr rather than the Gestapo.
The joint Abwehr-Gestapo enterprise secured ‘only one alleged “success”’, according to Ehrhardt – the destruction of a Free French resistance group headed by Georges Rivelain-Kaufman. A former judge in the French Concession, Kaufman, a Jew, had been dismissed from his position in 1941 following the decision of the French authorities to apply Vichy anti-Jewish laws. Thereafter Kaufman established contact with the Free French underground in Indo-China and also, using Chinese couriers, with Allied representatives in Chungking. Kaufman’s group was said to have prepared plans ‘to seize and destroy forty ammunition factories and ten water and power sub-stations’ in order to weaken the Japanese defences of Shanghai. The German agents succeeded in uncovering the activities of the group. On 10 August 1944 Kaufman’s home was raided by ten Chinese. He was trussed up, beaten and questioned. Meanwhile the house was ransacked and ‘a priceless collection of gold watches … and a fortune in gold bars, US dollars and pounds sterling’ were removed. The raid was later identified as the work of the Wang Ching-wei political police operating out of 76 Jessfield Road.47 Presumably they had been tipped off by the Germans.
In return for the money and the vague cooperation agreement, Huber and Meisinger left Ehrhardt relatively free until the end of the war. Ehrhardt was not altogether happy about the compromise but felt that it was the only way to square Huber ‘with his petty party intrigues and his mud-slinging while at the same time utilizing and guiding into productive and harmless channels his ambition and craving for importance’.48
From the autumn of 1944 German consulates throughout China, on instructions from the German embassy, began burning confidential papers, fearful that they might be taken over by the Japanese. As their own position in Europe deteriorated, the Germans became increasingly worried about the reliability of their one remaining major ally. In January 1945 a telegram from the German military attaché in Tokyo was circulated within the German High Command. This reported that Russia and Japan had reached an agreement to reduce their forces facing each other in the Far East: as of 1 February the Red Army would station no more than ten divisions between Vladivostok and Novosibirsk while Japan would limit her forces to six divisions plus the Manchurian army. The military attaché noted, however, that this information was based only on a Shanghai agent’s report conveyed by the Shanghai Police attaché (Huber), uncorroborated by any other source, and thus was to be ‘treated with caution’.49 The military attaché’s scepticism regarding this report was probably justified: no other evidence has been found to substantiate it. At the same time, it may not have been totally baseless. The previous September, the Japanese government had approved a proposal by Foreign Minister Shigemitsu for the dispatch of a special representative to Moscow to negotiate an agreement in which such a mutual force reduction was one element: the Soviets refused even to receive the emissary and at the same time informed Washington of the approach.50
British intelligence reports in the spring of 1945 noted that the Japanese were taking defensive measures in Shanghai in anticipation of an attack. In March three ‘suicide battalions’ of 500 men each were formed by the local army authorities. In early April underground tunnels were being dug on the Route Cardinal Mercier (renamed Kueilin Road) to be used both as air raid shelters and for potential street fighting.51 An MI6 report in late April 1945, based on information from ‘a responsible Chinese official’, referred to ‘rumours … to the effect that representatives of Chungking and of the Japanese High Command in Shanghai were discussing the possibility of declaring Shanghai an open city’.52
On 8 May news reached Shanghai of the German surrender. At Lunghwa internment camp inmates learned the news from an American plane that flew overhead and traced ‘V.E.’ in the sky. In Chapei Camp H. E. Arnhold wrote that the news ‘caused much excitement and rejoicing in the camp. It was immediately assumed that the collapse of Japan was imminent and that we should soon be out of camp.’53 These hopes proved to be cruelly premature.
After the German surrender, Meisinger’s official activities seem to have been restricted mainly to moving around large sums of money between Tokyo and Shanghai.54 Allegedly these sums were to be used to support ‘welfare activities’ on behalf of German citizens in the Far East. As for Ehrhardt, he later claimed that he had issued a demobilization order to all his men on 12 May 1945. At the same time he arranged for them to use a communal kitchen at his office each day. A Japanese officer visited Ehrhardt shortly after the German surrender and asked him and his staff to continue to operate in the Japanese interest. According to a later statement by a sympathizer with Ehrhardt (probably Baron Jesco von Puttkamer), ‘Ehrhardt’s answer was evasive. He said that he was too sick to do so but he would ask his former staff members which he did not do.’55 Meanwhile Ehrhardt took the precaution of burning his organization’s records to prevent them falling into the hands of his allies.
It was not until 11 June that the Japanese government informed the German ambassador in Tokyo that German diplomatic and consular missions could no longer continue official activity. The personal status of German diplomats would not, however, be affected and the German economic delegation headed by Helmut Wohlthat would be permitted to carry on essential business, though it could no longer be recognized as an official representative body.56 Germans in Japan – but not in Shanghai – were subsequently rounded up and interned.
In late July and early August the German Residents’ Association in Shanghai held elections in which opposing slates of Nazi and anti-Nazi candidates were fielded. About 720 individuals and 60 firms voted, producing a solid victory for the Nazis, who won all but one of the seats on the association’s board of directors.57 The result was a striking testimony to the blinkered loyalty of the majority of Shanghai Germans (the ‘Aryan’ ones, that is) to the ideals of their dead Führer.
The German collapse in Europe had other effects in the Far East, notably on the position of the French. In spite of the return of the French Concession to China in mid-1943, the French had been permitted to retain their small military force in Shanghai – if for no other reason than that it had nowhere else to go. At that time the garrison consisted of 1,400 men, of whom 320 were French, 200 African and 880 Annamite (Indo-chinese). Four hundred of the Annamites rejected French discipline and volunteered to serve under the Japanese. The remainder mouldered in their barracks. But the Normandy landings and the subsequent eclipse of the Vichy régime made the Japanese less complaisant in this regard. As in the case of the Italians a little earlier, they now turned against erstwhile friends. On 9 March they launched a surprise attack on the French garrisons in Indo-China; those who resisted were massacred, the rest interned. The next day, the Japanese announced that they would no longer recognize the French diplomatic and consular representatives in China. At the same time the Japanese army authorities in Shanghai demanded the immediate disarmament of the French forces in the city. The recently appointed commander of the French garrison, Colonel A.J.F. Artigue, described as ‘un officier de très grand choix, énergique, sportif, ancien international militaire de rugby, aimé et admiré de tous’ felt that to agree without resistance would be an act of dishonour.58 He consulted his diplomatic colleagues who advised him to submit. The alternatives were terrible. The previous day the commander of the French garrison at Lang Son in Indo-China had been confronted with a similar demand. He refused to comply – whereupon he and the French administrator of the province were decapitated with sabres and the entire French garrison was massacred. ‘Given the impossibility and pointlessness of resistance’, as a French consular account put it, ‘the French authorities in Shanghai were obliged to agree’ to the Japanese demands.59 The disarmed French troops henceforth mouldered in the Bernez-Cambot barracks on the Route Frelupt. Their commander brooded on his decision, with ultimately tragic consequences.
Upon the German surrender, radio station XGRS was transferred by its German owners to the Japanese. According to the broadcaster Herbert Moy, the Germans handed it over in return for six bottles of whisky. Most of the previous employees resigned, but Moy continued to broadcast – and to drink heavily. He told cronies that his elder brother was a general in the Chungking forces and his younger one a lieutenant in the American army. ‘He made some feeling remark about “their fighting like hell for our country” and here, goddamit, am I, getting tight as all blazes.’60 Deprived of many of the former German announcers, the Japanese juggled their remaining Allied collaborators: Frank Johnston (‘Pat Kelly’) returned to his old microphone at XGRS, while J. K. Gracie (‘Sergeant Alan McIntosh’) was transferred to the Japanese station XGOO.
On 7 July 1945, the Allied ‘political’ internees who had been held at the Haiphong Road camp since November 1942 were suddenly moved to Peking. The journey took five days and, in the extreme summer heat, was a considerable ordeal.61 The Swiss chargé d’affaires reported to Berne the alarming news that these men now appeared to be considered as ‘hostages’ by the Japanese.62
In the financial confusion of the summer of 1945, some Shanghai residents took refuge in strange delusions: one was the sudden popularity of old Russian rouble notes of the Tsarist period. Large quantities of such notes had been brought to Shanghai by White Russian refugees at the end of the Russian Civil War. At one point they had seemed almost worthless and were used to light cigarettes. But now some people calculated that they might recover value. Self-styled experts explained that closer relations between Britain and the USSR would be likely to produce an agreement between London and Moscow over the repayment of the old Russian debt, repudiated by the Soviets shortly after the revolution. Such an agreement, it was suggested, would restore value not only to old Russian bonds but also to currency notes. A police report noted that, as a result of such optimistic calculations, people were ‘opening up old trunks in a frantic search for old Rouble notes’.63* Can one detect the directing brain of ‘Captain’ Pick behind this fantastic notion? Or was this another example of long-distance currency manipulation by the SOE’s ‘REMORSE’ group? Whatever its source, the rouble bubble grew into a manic speculation – until it ultimately and inevitably burst.
On 17 July a Japanese radio station in Hongkew was bombed. Some bombs missed their target and landed in the nearby Jewish refugee area: 30 Jews and many more Chinese were killed. On 20 July the Australian turncoat Alan Raymond broadcast one of his last commentaries: ‘Despite the approaching battle,’ he said, ‘Shanghai continues as usual. In point of gaiety and amusements, there is no other community anywhere in the world like it.’64
News of the Russian entry into the Far Eastern war on 8 August caused a panic on the Shanghai markets. Many Shanghai Russians now changed their tune opportunistically and applied for Soviet citizenship. The old White Russian Club closed down. At the Yar restaurant on the Route Cardinal Mercier a drunken gaggle of bar-girls, known as ‘Lojnikoff’s Harem’, indulged in a final orgiastic party with Russian and Japanese friends. Eugene Pick held a melancholy farewell dinner in his room at the Cathay Hotel with the Japanese naval attaché. Also present was Pick’s young Russian radio operator Vyacheslav Toropovsky and the latter’s mother (wife of James Smart, former chief of the British radio monitoring station in Shanghai). At one point Pick whispered to Toropovsky that he had reason to believe that the Japanese were trying to kill him. The young man disgustedly suspected that his host was preparing the ground for his disappearance from Shanghai. Pick, in fact, left the city soon after.65
Reports of the explosion of nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, and understanding of the magnitude of death and suffering inflicted, drifted only gradually across the China Sea. Japanese troops and civilians in Shanghai therefore reacted with horror and incredulity as they listened on 14 August to the radio broadcast of the emperor’s ‘rescript’, ordering his nation to surrender. The non-Japanese staff at station XGRS held a party the following evening to celebrate. Herbert Moy drank half a bottle of whisky and then went with Frank Johnston to his office. After a while, Johnston left and Moy remained alone. He locked the door and then slit his throat and wrists with a razor. He sat down at his desk and smoked a last cigarette as his blood coursed out. Finding himself, after a time, still alive, he went to the window and threw himself out. His corpse was found on the pavement the next day. According to his mistress, Marquita Kwong, he had been talking about suicide for several days, ruminating that ‘when a man has been playing the type of game I have, there is only one thing for him to do should he lose’.66
For several weeks Shanghai hovered in a strange limbo as it waited for the arrival of Allied troops. An OSS project to land ‘mercy teams’ in a number of occupied areas, including Shanghai, proved premature when the Shanghai team, code-named SPARROW, parachuted safely into the city but was immediately arrested and interned by the Japanese. On 18 August an American C47 cargo plane made several low sweeps over Shanghai and then landed at the Kiangwan aerodrome. It unloaded a goodwill mission with medical and other supplies for Allied internees. The Swiss consulate took over responsibility for the internment camps in Shanghai. It was some time, however, before the inmates were able to leave. Most, in any case, had as yet nowhere to go.
Internal hatreds within various national groups erupted in outbreaks of violence. On 10 August a group of Italian self-styled ‘anti-fascists’, headed by one Elia Garzea, seized the Italian embassy in Shanghai and tore down the fascist emblems from the front of the building. Garzea, it turned out, was a late convert to the democratic cause. He had been a fascist party member since 1937 and had participated in various fascist bully-boy activities. He had also attempted to blackmail a local Italian. A secretary at the embassy, Pasquale Prunas, later declared: ‘The last time I saw him he was peddling color pictures of Mussolini around the Embassy. We told him we didn’t want any. I suppose he’s peddling pictures of Stalin now.’ Garzea nevertheless organized an ‘Anti-Fascist Association’ and tried to secure election as president of the Italian community in Shanghai.67
On 19 August 15 men wearing French police uniform raided the house on Kinnear Road of Georges Rivelain-Kaufman. He was not at home, having taken refuge in the home of a Baghdadi Jewish millionaire. The judge’s house was ransacked: furniture, antiques and precious porcelain were destroyed. The homes of other former French officials were raided the same night and 20 men were arrested and charged with ‘inciting Annamite troops and the local French community to rebellion’.68
The transfer of authority was agonizingly slow. Far from the fighting lines, and apparently forgotten by the belligerents, Shanghai waited, like a patient old horse, for its masters to return. On 24 August the new Chungking-nominated deputy mayor of the city appeared with an entourage of thirty officials. Chiang Kai-shek’s military representative had arrived a few days earlier, but in the absence of significant Allied military forces the Japanese remained formally in charge of the city. It was not until 7 September that the deputy chief of the Japanese 13th Army formally surrendered Shanghai to the commander of the Chinese 3rd Chungking Army. Japanese arms and equipment handed over in Shanghai included more than 100 aircraft, 494 field guns, 181 heavy machine-guns, 16,500 rifles, 2,262 horses, 626 carrier pigeons, 368 axes and 29 waterproof food bags.69 In this manner, the Second World War, which had begun in China exactly 98 months earlier, also reached its terminus there.
*The hoped-for debt agreement was finally concluded in 1986 when the USSR agreed to pay $120 million in compensation to British holders of pre-1917 Russian bonds. The agreement had no noticeable effect on the value of imperial rouble banknotes.