‘Hello everybody!’ announced the Argentina Nite Club in the Shanghai Herald. Once the haunt of Nazi agents and Japanese officers, the Russian-owned Argentina now styled itself as ‘Shanghai’s only American-run Night-Club and Cocktail Lounge’ and featured the husband-and-wife American dance team of ‘Cheetah and Billy Carroll’, who had recently been released from internment.1 American films, flown in from Chungking, reappeared on the cinema screens, beginning at the Roxy with Naughty Marietta, starring Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and at the Nanking Theater with Dorothy Lamour in Aloma of the South Seas. MGM made special arrangements to rush in a print of Thirty Minutes over Tokyo, depicting the Doolittle raid in 1942.
American sailors on port leave, ‘their pockets bulging with wads of puppet currency’, raided the shops like locusts. ‘Silk stockings and filmy black lace panties and brassières were the first things the sailors bought. These were depleted in short order. Their attention then turned to silk hand-embroidered slips, night-gowns, bed-jackets, Chinese pajamas and slippers.’ Like manna from heaven, goods of every description suddenly descended on the Shanghai markets: electric kettles and toasters, typewriters, cameras, radios, aluminium pressure cookers, waffle irons, trinkets, fake curios of every description – and even crated automobiles. One sailor from Brooklyn declared: ‘This is an unbelievable spot for us guys who have been out there around those Pacific islands for three years. Brother – this is heaven!’2
Unlike most of the great cities of Japan and many of China, Shanghai bore few physical marks of war. ‘The town is shabby. The Bund looks well enough, although hawkers have begun to establish their stalls on the pavements – doubtless the shape of things to come,’ reported the reopened office of Butterfield & Swire.3 The Allied internees, cocooned from the outside world for the previous three years, had lost touch not only with family and friends but with the rapid development of language under wartime conditions. ‘What’s a jeep?’ asked one?4 Another described his impressions upon release. On the face of things, it was ‘just the same old Shanghai’, he wrote, except that the street fortifications and air raid shelters ‘looked like ugly scars on the city’s face and the general air of having undergone hard wear and tear was upon everything’.5 Sudden release had traumatic and sometimes tragic effects: one British lawyer committed suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of the Embankment Building shortly after returning from the Weihsien internment camp.
Bizarrely, the 100,000 Japanese troops in the city remained on duty, under Allied orders, to prevent a breakdown in law and order. They still stood guard over essential utilities, government offices and even the Foreign YMCA. As the transfer of power took effect, many changed their uniforms for civilian clothes and quietly melted into the Japanese civilian population of Hongkew. Others remained in uniform under Chinese command and guarded the railway carrying coal to Shanghai from the Kailan Mines.
Behind the scenes, Tai Li, Tu Yueh-sheng and Milton Miles (newly promoted to rear-admiral) were rumoured to have made arrangements with the Japanese and the Chinese puppet authorities to provide for a smooth transition in the city – one, that is, in which there would be no danger of a communist takeover. The rumours had considerable basis in fact. When Tai Li introduced Miles to Tu, the American officer rather took to the ageing gangster: ‘a mannerly and ostensibly amiable old gentleman with a long, cadaverous face and snaggle teeth’.6
On 19 September Admiral T. C. Kinkaid’s flagship, the USS Rocky Mount, arrived at the head of an armada of American navy ships, with vast stores originally assembled for the projected invasion of Japan. Cheering crowds lined the river banks. Three entire US fleets, the 4th, 6th and 7th, assembled outside the mouth of the river and were soon joined by a British naval task force. By 23 September more than a dozen American and British warships had returned, recreating the pre-1941 Warship Row on the Whangpoo.
Miles and Tai Li held a reception to welcome the Allied admirals. Among the American naval personnel who returned to Shanghai in triumph was Captain Columbus Darwin Smith who had escaped so daringly from the city a year earlier. He was placed in command of the Shanghai harbour pilots. Signs of the new pecking order of the great powers were soon visible. By tradition, before the war, the British had always retained the right to use the no. 1 buoy for mooring ships opposite the Bund. Now, Miles, in his capacity as port director, scored a subtle point off his ally and assigned the berth to the biggest ship in port: an American cruiser. The Americans established their naval headquarters in the Glen Line Building, formerly British-owned, and only recently vacated by the German embassy.
In order to help forestall any threat of a communist takeover, American planes airlifted tens of thousands of Chinese troops into the Shanghai area. At the same time the US authorities did not wish to appear publicly to be intervening in Chinese politics. General Wedemeyer was therefore angered by Miles’s continued involvement with Tai Li and by the publicity that the two attracted. Miles, fearful of a plot against him, became dependent on pills and showed signs of mental instability. The climax of the row came with a press conference, called by Miles in Shanghai, at which-he intended to announce that he did not recognize Wedemeyer’s authority. In his memoirs, published some years later, Miles admitted that he had been ‘all wound up’ and ‘already a little off my rocker’.7 His career in China ended abruptly. On Wedemeyer’s orders he was placed in the charge of navy doctors who removed him unceremoniously to Washington. The Chinese awarded him Medal No. 90 of the Order of the White Cloud and Golden Banner and accorded him the rank of lieutenant-general. The United States demoted him to captain.
On 26 September the Shanghai Herald celebrated the arrival of the US naval hospital ship Refuge with 29 ‘companionable and pretty’ nurses aboard. The influx of Americans and American money helped stimulate a revival of all the pre-war rackets. On 3 October the paper reported that a large number of bars and restaurants in the city had been placed out of bounds to US military and naval personnel, as had ‘all Shanghai brothels, regardless of their size or location’, one of the more spectacularly unenforceable orders given to the victorious soldiery. Italian sailors from the scuttled liner Conte Verde happily continued their enforced holiday, dining at the Senet on Avenue Joffre (apparently returned to its old name) to music from the refugee pianists ‘Gino and Gizza’. Shanghai in the late 1940s was like a long-running hit musical with a new cast gamely performing the old routines.
Not everybody could participate in the jollifications. Although the Allied internees were free, including the ‘politicals’ from the Haiphong Road camp who were liberated at Peking, many had nowhere to go. Two months after the Japanese surrender 20 per cent of the internees were still living in camps. Former employees of the Shanghai Municipal Council or of the settlement police no longer had jobs and many returned from internment to find home and household effects all gone. Most of the police felt bitterness at the consequences of having followed official instructions to remain in Shanghai before December 1941: ‘Now the war is over and the Allies are nominally the victors but here in Shanghai we are in the anomalous position of having won the war whilst losing everything else not through enemy action but by reason of the action of our own Government and that of our ally, the Chungking Government.’8 A few found police jobs in Hong Kong or other colonies. Most, like Allied civilians in general, waited impatiently for arrangements to be made for their repatriation. The first Allied vessel to sail with repatriates was the USS Refuge, which left for Okinawa on 27 September. It carried 443 passengers, mainly American ex-internees. On 3 October HMS Guardian and HMS Glenearn left for Hong Kong with over 300 British repatriates.
Retribution followed hard on the heels of liberation. Japanese civilians in Shanghai, who had increased to nearly 100,000 during the war, were subjected to unpleasant treatment that most other foreigners regarded merely as a dose of their own medicine. They were compelled to wear armbands and were segregated in Hongkew. Eventually they were all compulsorily repatriated, part of a great multitude of more than 5 million Japanese from all over the former ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ who were bundled off to their homeland.
Denunciations of all kinds flew around among the foreign communities. Hardy R. Grubb, a former chief inspector in the Municipal Police, accused his ex-colleague Harry Robertson of collaboration with the enemy. Grubb related that Robertson, after being dismissed from his post of deputy commissioner, had ‘voluntarily consented to act as an adviser in police matters’ to his Japanese successor. Grubb added that ‘when treated with contempt for his pro-Japanese actions by several senior police officers’, Robertson had ‘threatened to report to the Japanese commissioner, which threat if carried out would probably have led to investigations from or confinement in the Bridge House’. Other ex-police officers corroborated Grubb’s account and further accused Robertson of threatening behaviour towards fellow internees in the Yu Yuen Road and Yangtsepoo internment camps.9 Of course, except for the alleged threats, Robertson’s conduct did not differ essentially from that of other senior police officers. All were shielded by the pre-war instruction to remain at their posts. None was prosecuted after the war.
The equivocal behaviour of many of the French in wartime Shanghai led some to look for a settling of accounts at the end of the war. But although resistance leaders like Roderick Egal were rehabilitated and honoured, there was little in the way of a Far Eastern ‘épuration’. In November 1945 two French officers, one of them Captain Jacques Guillermaz, a member of the DGER (Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches, the French intelligence service), arrived in Shanghai to deal with what he called the ‘miserable remnant of our “occupation force” in China’, disarmed by the Japanese the previous spring. They found the troops in a ‘distressing situation’. Nothing had been done for them since the Japanese surrender and the soldiers felt ‘morally and materially abandoned’. Guillermaz concluded that it was necessary ‘to put an end to their situation immediately, as much for reasons of national prestige as for their own sakes’. During their period of enforced disarmament, their commander, Colonel Artigue, had grown steadily more agitated over what he felt was the shame of his submission to the Japanese the previous spring. He said to Guillermaz: ‘They deceived me. We should have fought!’ Guillermaz assured him that in the circumstances he would have taken the same decision. That evening at dinner, there was some discussion of the suicide of the former French police commissioner, L. Fabre. ‘Il s’étonnait d’un geste qu’il n’aurait lui-même jamais accompli. Déclaration sincère? Appel désespéré que nous ne comprîmes pas?’ The next day Artigue shot himself in the head on the terrace of his office. The shot left him critically wounded, though still conscious. Guillermaz informed Paris and, at his suggestion, de Gaulle sent Artigue a message assuring him of his sympathy and understanding. Artigue lingered on for another two years, then died. Guillermaz noted sadly that a Russian journalist claimed that he had been specially sent from Paris to settle accounts with Colonel Artigue whom he had supposedly forced to commit suicide. ‘Pénibles absurdités qu’explique le climat de l’époque.’10
Fabre’s former deputy, Roland Sarly, who had served the Chinese puppet régime since 1943, was arrested by the Chinese on 14 December 1945 and charged with collaboration with the Japanese. Reflecting the changed mood in the French community, the committee of the French Club asked the consul-general to ‘request that R. Sarly abstain for the time being from appearing’ in the club.11 The French authorities nevertheless protested vigorously against Sarly’s arrest, claiming that they had not yet formally relinquished their extraterritorial rights.12 The treaty of 1943 with the Wang Ching-wei régime had not, after all, been regarded as valid by Chungking. The French chose to regard the surrender of authority by the French consul-general as having been ‘on a municipal not on a governmental level’. Judicial proceedings in the Sarly case dragged on for three years before the Chinese Supreme Court in Nanking finally cleared him of all charges.13
Germans in Shanghai were at first allowed to continue their lives freely. After October 1945 about 200 out of the 2,000 or so non-refugee Germans in Shanghai were rounded up and placed in the Kiangwan Segregation Center, a former Japanese high school. They were maintained in part by a small stockpile of gold bars that representatives of the local German community had entrusted for safe keeping to the Swiss consul-general shortly after Stalingrad. The rest remained at liberty. The Shanghai Municipal Government formed a German Affairs Commission that registered and eventually repatriated most of them to Germany. But as an American intelligence report noted,
The internment of Germans by the Chinese in Shanghai can only be described as an absolute farce. Some of the leading Nazi Party members, intelligence agents and officials and propagandists have not been interned. Some who had been interned were released and others have been able to secure passes to visit Shanghai almost any time they desire.14
The explanation appeared to be the susceptibility of officials of the German Affairs Commission to offers of squeeze.
War criminals were rounded up and placed in detention. Japanese torturers from the Bridge House jail faced war crimes charges before Allied courts. Josef Meisinger, the former Far Eastern Gestapo boss, was classified by US Counter-Intelligence as ‘public enemy number one of Nazi war criminals in the Far East’.15 He was captured at Kawaguchi, near Tokyo, on 6 September 1945. The American war crimes office in Tokyo reported the arrest to General MacArthur and, no doubt as a result of some poetic garbling of intelligence records, added that Meisinger was ‘reputed to be a friend of Heydrich and Himmler and a homosexual’.16 While held at the Kawaguchi View Hotel, Meisinger talked of shooting himself. Later he made a half-hearted suicide attempt by slashing his wrists with a razor. The attempt failed and he was sent for interrogation by US investigators. The Americans eventually decided to turn him over to Poland for trial as a war criminal. Found guilty of mass murder, he was sentenced to death on 3 March 1947 by the Supreme National Tribunal of the Polish People’s Republic. He was executed four days later.
Also arrested were other German officials, among them the former ambassador to China, Stahmer, and the ‘butcher of Buchenwald’, Dr Robert Neumann, who had latterly been eking out his pathological living as a piano teacher. Letters and reports began to appear in local newspapers denouncing Germans as war criminals and demanding action against them. Some Germans made public protestations of their innocence of the Nazi taint and even many former party members, officials, propagandists and agents claimed to have had democratic sympathies. Walter Schmalfuss, a former translator in Baron Puttkamer’s propaganda bureau, offered the following evidence of his anti-Nazi views in response to a denunciation in a local Russian paper:
What made me a definite anti-Nazi is through the snubbing directed against my wife. She is 3∕ 4 Spanish and 1∕ 4 Filipino. When she came here in August 1941 in order to get married, we had to overcome many obstacles in order to get married at all. The Nazi[s] here in Shanghai were strictly enforcing a rule not to marry Germans to foreigners … What made me especially sore is the fact that my wife not only has the finest education that money can buy but her family tree boasts of such famous names as the Mcmahons, one of whom was President of the French Republic after Napoleon III abdicated in 1871. Naturally I felt more than indignation to be snubbed by men in Nazi uniform who only a little while ago had been practically nobody.17
Schmalfuss admitted that he had known the head of the Shanghai Gestapo agents’ network, Dr Klare, but insisted that their acquaintance had been limited to ‘a standing date to play Mahjong at the German Club’.
Among the most brazen efforts at self-exculpation was a letter to President Truman submitted in June 1946 by Klare’s deputy, the former XGRS broadcaster and agents’ outfitter, Frederick Wiehl:
During the war between the United States and Germany, I was in a tight spot. I sought the middle way of a compromise between the United States and Germany … When you took over the presidency … I put on a series of ten radio commentaries praising your record over the local ‘Radio Shanghai’, a German government radio station.
I wish to offer my services to you and the American people. For you, I wish to work in the internal German field. There, I would like to materialize in peacetime what the military failed to accomplish in wartime by military methods. I want to advise and assist the American Military Government in Germany to this end … Today, my wife and myself want to do our share towards the establishment of a permanent democratic German government.18
Some former Nazi agents did succeed in securing employment by their former enemies. For example, Otto Habenicht, the former decoding chief in the Ehrhardt Bureau, who had failed to decipher a single Allied intercept since the outbreak of the Pacific War, was given a job as a code expert by the Chinese government.
Another ex-Nazi who found a niche under the new dispensation was the late Dr Miorini’s old classmate and bosom companion. Hermann Erben was released from Pootung internment camp on 17 August 1945. Remarkably, after more than two years of detention, his loyalty to the Axis was undimmed. His first port of call upon release was the former German consul, Dr Hoops, to whom he reported that he had returned ‘from military assignment by the Bureau Ehrhardt from the Pootung Assembly Center after two and one-half years, and asked for further orders’. Perhaps he hoped to obtain accumulated back pay due to him: he had received no remittances from his German employers since April 1943. But the substantial funds being administered by Meisinger for ‘welfare activities’ seemed to have evaporated. At any rate, nothing was available for this most deserving of cases. Hoops told Erben that he was no longer officially German consul. He suggested that Erben contact Ehrhardt at his office in Ferry Road and obtain his ‘discharge orders and whatever’ from him.19 Erben thereupon telephoned Ehrhardt whom he found in a rather cross frame of mind. The former Abwehr officer in effect gave his loyal employee the brush-off, telling him ‘that there was no reason for me to be indignant that I was not met by a reception committee. They were not sleeping. They had been with their boots on, up to the last minute active.’ A few days later Erben paid a call on his former German controller, Hans Mosberg, in his flat on the Yu Yuen Road. Mosberg told Erben he shared his resentment against the Japanese and ‘could understand that I was quite sore about the two and half years I had spent there [in internment]’.20
The realization that his service to the Axis cause as a volunteer internee had been an exercise in self-deception and futility began to exercise Erben’s mind. On his release he had also begun to investigate the death of his friend Miorini and soon concluded that the most likely cause was murder by the Shanghai Nazi apparatus. His old loyalties consequently turned to thoughts of revenge – and the revolutionized political situation in Shanghai afforded him an opportunity to wreak it.
Soon after the Japanese had surrendered, Erben visited the American consulate-general and applied for repatriation to the USA as an ex-internee, admitting at the same time that his citizenship was in question. On 8 October 1945 Erben obtained employment with a malaria control unit of the US Army Medical Corps at a salary of $90 a month. A month later he was arrested by the US provost marshal and lodged in the Ward Road jail. He was investigated by the US Army War Crimes Branch but was saved from prosecution as a traitor by the fact of his American denaturalization in 1941. Upon his release in January 1946, he resumed work with the US government. His duties, however, had changed. He was now assigned at the same rate of pay to the US Army Counter-intelligence Corps under the orders of Captain Jerome Farrell, a former journalist. Erben later claimed that he was employed ‘as an investigator’ and he added: ‘My orders were to follow the case of Dr von Miorini.’21
Erben remained a US Army civilian employee until July 1946. His prime role during this period was to advise the American authorities about the wartime activities of Shanghai Germans. His object was to ingratiate himself with the Americans and to ‘gain absolution for his past sins as a traitor’ – as his American contact put it.22 His new employers, like his old, regarded him with suspicion. An American intelligence official warned that an extensive file existed on Erben ‘and none of the material is of a complimentary nature’.23
Erben was dismissed by the US army in July 1946, but refused to give up work. In April 1947 he reappeared in Shanghai in American uniform ‘minus insignia’, claimed to be working once again for American intelligence and questioned Polish citizens about communist contacts.24 A little later Erben was reported to be ‘blackmailing Jewish refugees, especially those who have applied for visas to the United States’, warning that ‘if they do not follow his requests he will inform against them and see that they are not granted permission to enter the United States’.25 Erben himself hoped to go and live in America but in August 1947 he was arrested by the Chinese Gendarmerie and deported to Germany. He was held in an American-administered detention centre at Ludwigsburg, where he became well-known ‘due to the fact that [as a protest against his detention] he habitually walked around wrapped in nothing but U.S. Army blankets with a rope tied round his waist’.26 Upon release, he resumed the practice of medicine, taking up residence in a number of exotic locations, including Teheran, Jiddah and Tandjung Priok (Indonesia). His dead body was found frozen in his unheated apartment in Vienna in January 1985.
Although Erben was not taken very seriously by the Americans, they utilized him to help build a case against his former colleagues in the German intelligence bureau. In April 1946 Ludwig Ehrhardt and other former members of his organization were arrested in Shanghai. The substance of the charge against all of them was that ‘they furnished Japan with military intelligence and disseminated propaganda detrimental to the United States and other Allied nations’ between the German surrender on 8 May 1945 and the Japanese collapse three months later. All the accused pleaded not guilty.
Proceedings in United States of America v. Lothar Eisentraeger alias Ludwig Ehrhardt et al. opened before a US military tribunal sitting at Shanghai in August 1946. Besides Ehrhardt, 22 Germans were accused. Another four, members of the Peking offshoot of the bureau, were later added, making a total of 27 accused in all, including most of Ehrhardt’s chief operatives as well as other prominent German officials who had served in China, among them Ernst Woermann, a former German ambassador to the Wang Chingwei régime, and Baron Jesco von Puttkamer, the former German propaganda chief in Shanghai.
The first witness for the prosecution was Ehrhardt’s disgraced predecessor, Louis Siefken, no doubt inwardly rejoicing in the opportunity to turn the tables on his former rival. The second prosecution witness was Erben, ‘who freely admitted his activities as a German agent but sought to give the impression that he was in reality working for the Allied interests’ – as an American diplomatic report put it.27 The third witness was more damning since, unlike the first two, he had no obvious axe to grind: Lieutenant-Colonel Mori Akira, former head of the intelligence branch of the Japanese Army Office in Shanghai, who was brought back from Japan to give evidence. He testified that his office had continued to receive intelligence information from the Ehrhardt Bureau after the German surrender and ‘that voluntary agreements to continue working with the Japanese were signed by each member as well as by Baron von Puttkamer for the German Information Bureau’.28 He believed these compromising documents had been burned together with other documents after the Japanese surrender. This evidence was corroborated by other Japanese witnesses as well as by three Italian radio operators for the bureau and by Chinese and German witnesses. Gerda Kocher, Ehrhardt’s former secretary, testified that in July 1945 the Japanese had offered each member of the bureau 2 ounces of gold for services rendered ‘and that she believed all members of the staff except herself and Habenicht signed receipts for this gold’.29
Upon conclusion of the prosecution case in November 1946, charges against six of the defendants were dismissed. In the cases of Woermann and four others the verdict was given because they were diplomats, in the case of Schenke it was on the ground that the prosecution had failed to establish that he had continued to engage in anti-Allied activity after the German surrender. The six were nevertheless held in custody pending repatriation to Germany.
When the trial resumed for presentation of the defence, Japanese and German witnesses gave evidence tending to show that the Ehrhardt Bureau had not continued to work after 8 May 1945 but had merely gathered to partake of free meals. Hermann Gerhard, an assistant cook at the bureau’s premises at 225 Ferry Road, testified that ‘he had never seen Ehrhardt do any work either before or after the German surrender’. Ehrhardt’s valet confirmed this, saying that ‘he never saw any paper work being done there, that the Germans simply took their meals and sat around playing games and talking together’.30 Testimony was also given by the non-Nazi pastor of the Lutheran Evangelical church in Shanghai who appeared as a character witness for Hans Mosberg. He paid tribute to Mosberg’s ‘character and high ideals’, stressing particularly his admiration for the United States and his Christian attitude (Mosberg, it will be recalled, was of Jewish origin).
In early 1947 Ehrhardt was sentenced to life imprisonment. Putt- kamer and one other received 30 years’ hard labour. The rest were given prison terms of 5–20 years. The prisoners were repatriated to serve their sentences at Landsberg prison in Bavaria. All were released, however, in 1950 after further investigation of the case by a US army inquiry commission.
The Germans’ former opposite numbers in Allied intelligence scattered. Some of the British businessmen resumed control of their companies in Shanghai; others went home. Valentine Killery, former head of SOE’s Oriental Mission, returned to England to become a director of ICI. W. J. Gande, former head of Oriental Mission Shanghai group, was awarded the King’s Commendation ‘for his unflinching courage and devotion to his country in the face of nearly four years of bitter Japanese oppression’. The ceremony at the British consulate in Shanghai, on 9 April 1947, was attended by several of his former associates and fellow-prisoners, including S. C. Riggs and Eric Davies.31 Godfrey Phillips, former chief civil servant of the Shanghai Municipal Council had no job to go back to in Shanghai at the end of the war. He became head of Lazard Brothers in the City of London and a director of several companies.
The taipan brothers John and W. J. (‘Tony’) Keswick returned to Shanghai in 1946 to run Jardine, Matheson. They remained there until after the communist takeover, John Keswick’s wartime contacts in Chungking with Chou En-lai proving useful at that juncture. Later, however, the firm lost all its assets in mainland China. Jardines shifted their centre of operations to Hong Kong, where they prospered greatly. Although they maintained substantial holdings in Hong Kong, the legal domicile of the firm was moved to Bermuda in the 1980s in anticipation of the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. John died in 1982 and Tony in 1990.
While most former enemies and allied citizens were repatriated, one group of foreigners seemed for a time to flourish in Shanghai:
Another bitter pill for the former internees to swallow [an American intelligence report noted] is the sight of scores of foreign collaborators of various nationalities, still scot-free and with pockets full of money, promenading Nanking Road and Bubbling Well Road, frequenting the reopened hotels and night-clubs. Their obvious prosperity and arrogance contrast sharply with the gaunt looks and threadbare clothes of the camp residents.
Many of these traitors and collaborators are well known throughout the foreign community. They are now conspicuous chiefly through their cultivating the company of the American armed forces, particularly officers, in Shanghai. Especially the women are seen in public with American officers, in the hotels, cabarets, at moving-picture shows, or riding in official motor cars. Some of the men are working for various American agencies, mostly in minor capacities.
Among examples cited were two women: the Scottish wife of a Chinese collaborator and ‘Princess’ Sumaire, described as ‘an outcast member of the ruling family of the Indian state of Patiala and a former German agent in France and Japanese and German agent in Shanghai’. This almost certainly gives too much political credit to Sumaire’s flamboyant but mainly apolitical activities. ‘It goes without saying’, the report added, ‘that both these extremely dangerous women are also extremely good-looking.’ Among other collaborators mentioned were the broadcasters Don Chisholm and Frank Johnston, the hit-man Nathan Rabin and Paul Lojnikoff (‘was a section chief of the Japanese Gendarmerie and is now working full-time for the Chinese Gendarmerie’32).
These complaints had some basis in fact. On 28 October the Shanghai Herald announced that Lojnikoff, who had been absent from the ring for more than a year, would shortly face ‘Slugger’ Tommy Foster of the USS Dixie. The pugilist, it seemed, had adjusted rapidly to the new realities, since he was reported by American intelligence to be ‘driving about the city in a large motor car bearing the Soviet flag’. In November 1945 Lojnikoff was arrested by the American authorities in Shanghai and ‘held for investigation in connection with war criminal activities’.33 A short time later, however, he was released ‘for lack of evidence’.34 Over the following months he resumed black market dealing – but developed new contacts. He was reported to be trading in stolen American tires and motorcycles and to be acting as an informer for the Shanghai-Woosung garrison command of the Chinese army.35 The ‘pretty boy’ of the Pick gang eventually moved to the USA where he continued his boxing career. He died as a result of blows received in the ring.
The Filipino collaborator Conrado Uy stated to American intelligence officials:
Between the Japanese and the Americans I would take the Americans any time … A student who used to be thrilled at the mere sight of George Washington’s picture on the wall, would not suddenly open his arms to Emperor Hirohito in later years. A man who still loves to shout Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death’, could not be so easily persuaded to become a brainless willing tool of militaristic tin gods who came running roughshod over my country and over China, my father’s native land.
Hard pressed to say why he had nevertheless become an instrument of the Japanese, Uy explained his wartime conduct as the result of ‘compulsion of circumstances beyond human control’.36 Uy’s eloquent nationalism found its eventual reward: in 1949, at the time of the fall of Shanghai to the communists, he was serving as administrative officer at the Filipino consulate in the city.
The British Foreign Office agonized for some time over the case of E. A. Nottingham, former owner of the Shanghai Times. At the liberation his paper had been seized by the Chinese nationalists and was thenceforth published under Chinese management as the Shanghai Herald. Nottingham appealed to the British authorities for support in reclaiming his property. Given his pre-war and wartime record of cooperation with the Japanese, he encountered a far from sympathetic reaction but, it seemed, evidence of his collaboration was legally inconclusive.37 His age and poor state of health eventually enabled him to escape prosecution.
Edward Nathan, whose wartime cooperation with the Japanese army at the Kailan Mines had so exercised Anthony Eden and the Foreign Office, continued to enjoy the full confidence of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, of which he was appointed chairman. The company continued its efforts to clear his name, but in April 1946 the Foreign Office wrote that ‘Mr Bevin has nothing to add to Mr Eden’s letter’.38 After the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, the company was compelled to relinquish its interest in the Kailan Mines and ceased operations in China.
Don Chisholm, the blackmailing former editor of Shopping News, was arrested by American forces in Shanghai on 6 September 1945, but was released 24 hours later without being charged. In the course of the following weeks he claimed to be employed by US naval intelligence ‘which’, reported the China Press, ‘United States authorities here neither confirmed nor denied’. Chisholm was certainly acting as an informant, probably for pay. On 30 October, after what the China Press described as ‘nearly two months of procrastination and indecision’, he was rearrested and placed in the municipal jail, charged with suspected collaborationist activity.39 The ensuing investigation was protracted for nearly two years. In the end it was decided to release Chisholm without pursuing the charges against him.40
Among the former associates on whom Chisholm provided US counter-intelligence authorities with information was ‘Princess’ Sumaire. After the liberation, she had encountered renewed financial problems. She sold her house and moved to the suburb of Hungjao. She took up with an American newspaperman and started to cultivate a new set of friends. American officers and immigration officials from the United States consulate now figured on her cocktail party guest list.41 In October 1945 Sumaire wrote a long letter to her kinsman the Maharajah of Patiala setting out her sad financial situation and begging for money. ‘After a lifetime of tears and loneliness’, she began, ‘I have at long last made up my mind to approach you in all earnestness and with all the decency in my heart that only suffering in huge doses could bring.’ She recounted her story of imprisonment by the Japanese during the war, confiding that she had ‘survived this tragic incident of my life stronger in thoughts and mind but utterly weak from a physical point of view’. She intended, she continued, ‘to persue [sic] a literary career under a pen name, without any desire of disclosing any relationship with you’. At the same time she planned to buy a farm in South America, ‘pay back my debts of honour and get out of this miserable city of Shanghai that has the most unbearable memories for me. I am almost lost in this strange town amongst people who are mercenary and unkind.’42 The maharajah apparently heeded this maudlin appeal and sent her the £20,000 that she requested. Sumaire did not, however, leave Shanghai – apparently for lack of a valid passport. Instead she bought a curio shop in the Continental Building on Kiukiang Road. In May 1946 she was said to be planning to marry an American ex-army officer and hoped to move with him to America. Meanwhile she was ‘living a more or less quiet life’.43 The Chinese authorities considered arresting and deporting her but eventually decided to leave her alone.44 In December 1946 she was still in Shanghai, her American fiancé no longer in evidence. Despairing of making much money out of her antique shop, she wrote to the British War Crimes Commission, claiming compensation for her treatment by the Japanese at the Bridge House, which, she said, necessitated treatment at the Mayo Clinic in the United States.45
Sumaire’s former boyfriend Hilaire du Berrier found work as an informant for US counter-intelligence authorities in Shanghai. Under the name Abdullah De Berrière, he submitted reports on some of his wartime associates, notably Sumaire. Later he resumed work as a journalist, specializing in Indo-Chinese affairs. According to the curriculum vitae he prepared in 1957, Berrier served as adviser on Vietnam to the Geneva Conference of July 1955.46
Not all the Shanghai collaborators escaped punishment. Pick’s hit-man, Nathan Rabin, was arrested by the Chinese and charged with arms dealing and acting as an informer. Morris Gershkovitch was arrested by the Americans in the Philippines and committed to the Bilibid Prison, Muntinglupa, for investigation on charges of collaboration and espionage. The Australian broadcaster John Holland, who was in Japan at the time of the surrender, went into hiding on the island of Hokkaido from which he planned to return to China. When three Eighth Army counter-intelligence officers arrived at the Grand Hotel, Sapporo, to arrest him, he was reclining in the barber shop being shaved by a female barber while another manicured his nails. He was escorted back to Australia to face the music.
In October 1945 the British Foreign Office was informed by the British Naval Intelligence organization at Shanghai that ‘there were some twenty British subjects there against whom there was a prima facie case for a charge of collaboration with the Japanese’. Their continued presence in Shanghai was said to be ‘resented by those members of the British community who had suffered internment’.47 The Foreign Office and MI5 ruminated for some time whether to attempt to have them brought back for trial. Eventually, in December 1945, it was decided to ask the Chinese to hand over the six most serious cases. The number was subsequently further whittled down to three: the broadcasters, J. K. Gracie (‘Sergeant Alan McIntosh’), Robert Lamb (‘Billy Bailey’) and Frank Johnston (‘Pat Kelly’). At that time Johnston was reported by American intelligence authorities to be:
trafficking in cameras obtained from Germans and Japanese. His procedure is to approach enemy nationals and offer his assistance as a neutral. In the case of one Shimizu, a Japanese who does not wear an arm-band and circulates all over town, he obtained a camera, a watch and other goods to the value of several hundred dollars. Shimizu now claims that he has been tricked and is looking for Johnston.48
The Chinese did not respond to the British request until April 1946: they then arrested the three men, who were placed in Ward Road jail. The Chinese nevertheless refused to hand them over for trial unless the British, by way of ‘reciprocity’ returned to China 42 Chinese alleged traitors from Burma as well as additional suspects from other British territories in the Far East. The British were reluctant to accede to this demand and protested that ‘they could not acquiesce in a position where three British subjects in Shanghai were apparently being held as hostages’. The British then tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Chinese to try the three men in Shanghai. It was not until early 1947 that the issue was resolved by their deportation to face trial in Hong Kong.
In addition to the three accused men, German witnesses, including Carl Flick-Steger, former head of radio station XGRS, and Baron Jesco von Puttkamer, were also sent to Hong Kong to give evidence. Gracie was found guilty and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. Johnston’s claim to Irish citizenship was not recognized by the court and he received a ten-year sentence. Various British authorities tangled themselves up in knots over the case of Lamb. On legal advice it was decided not to pursue the case against him since, unlike his two fellow-broadcasters, his treasonable actions all dated from the period before the retrocession of the International Settlement in 1943. This fact was regarded as likely to impede a successful prosecution. In spite of this technical legal obstacle, he was brought to Hong Kong anyway, ‘due to the very natural desire of both His Majesty’s Consul-General and the Chinese Government to rid that city of a man with so unsavoury a record and of such dangerous potentialities’.49 Lamb was held in Hong Kong for several months while officials wrangled over what should be done with him. In the end he was released, whereupon he immediately lodged a suit for wrongful imprisonment. The Hong Kong government ‘somewhat quixotically’, as the presiding judge observed, ‘disbursed more than HK$1,700 for the plaintiff’s board and lodging since his release to enable him to take the present proceedings against itself’. Judgement was found in favour of Lamb but he was awarded only nominal damages.50
Lawrence Kentwell was arrested by the Chinese authorities in December 1945 and charged with collaboration. He vigorously protested his innocence, pointing to his long campaign for retrocession of the foreign enclaves as proof of his patriotism. His recent pro-Axis views faded from his memory as he avowed: ‘I am personally grateful to China’s brave and gallant Allies for defeating Japan – China’s deadly enemy. Now that victory is with us, let us all unite and rejoice, as one big family of nations and with toleration and goodwill all round.’ He complained that he suffered from ‘rheumatism of the left leg and stomach trouble’ and appealed for ‘humanitarian treatment’.51
Kentwell was arraigned in the Shanghai High Court in January 1946. Predictably, and disastrously, he undertook his own defence. A newspaper reporter commented that ‘he appeared quite gay and light-hearted in spite of the fact that he was facing a very grave charge’. Kentwell pointed out to the court that he could not be held guilty of collaboration as he was not a Chinese citizen. He had merely pretended to be one, he said, in order ‘to please his Chinese friends’, even though he had not, in fact, been naturalized. This was, in fact, the truth – but it was not accepted by the court. The judge told him that since his mother had been Chinese he would be considered as having held Chinese citizenship since 1931, the date of his denaturalization by the British. On the central issue, Kentwell delivered a long speech denying that he had ever collaborated. On the contrary, he argued, ‘in view of the shabby and uncivil treatment he had received at the hands of the British Government on account of his not being an Englishman of pure European descent, he [had] decided to help China against the imperialistic oppression of the British’. As an exhibit for the defence he produced a signed photo of appreciation from Chiang Kai-shek.52 The China Weekly Review (resurrected under the editorship of J. B. Powell’s son) commented unkindly: ‘Perhaps Kentwell’s defense would not have been so unexpectedly ludicrous had he been an illiterate coolie. But for one who studied law, the only wonder is that he ever had a client. Certainly no sane man would entrust his defence to a lawyer who defended him in the way that Kentwell is defending himself.’53 He was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The judgement was, however, subsequently set aside by the Chinese Supreme Court and Kentwell was sent back for a new trial. This time, wisely, he did not defend himself – though his lawyer had difficulty in restraining him from delivering a ‘melodramatic speech’.54 His ultimate fate is unknown.
During the autumn of 1945, the American authorities in China conducted an intensive and fruitless search for Eugene Pick. He was reported to have been seen in a barber’s shop in Shanghai, in a Russian Orthodox mission in Peking and elsewhere, but every lead turned out to be a false trail. In fact, Pick had flown in a small plane to Tsingtao on 14 August. From there he succeeded, by bribing a Japanese official, in securing passage on a boat to Japan just before the Japanese surrender. The ship hit a mine and exploded. Pick suffered a leg injury but survived. In a later submission to US intelligence officials, he claimed that his motive in going to Japan was ‘to disclose to the Americans all I knew’. ‘Besides’, he added, he had wanted to ‘see the monkeys on their knees’.55 When he arrived in Tokyo Pick received treatment for his leg wound and then went on crutches to the navy ministry to seek help. He had the good fortune to find there his former employer in the Shanghai Naval Intelligence Bureau, Commander Otani, who put him up at an inn and transferred 1 million yen from confidential navy ministry funds to a bank account in the name of ‘Koji’, one of Pick’s many noms de guerre. At Otani’s suggestion, Pick considered using the money to open a Russian nightclub in Tokyo.
In February 1946, sensing that the Americans were closing in on him, Pick decided to take the bull by the horns. He went to see the chief of the counter-intelligence section of the American occupation forces in Tokyo and offered to provide information about covert activities by former Japanese naval intelligence personnel, including Otani. Given the extent of the help he had received from Otani, this was, of course, a shocking act of betrayal – though perfectly in keeping with Pick’s character and previous history. In private letters to former acquaintances he railed against many of his old comrades whom he now regarded as traitors: Morris Gershkovitch, for example, was denounced as a ‘Jewish pig’.56 On 11 February 1946, as Pick and Otani were dining together at the Takahashi Hotel, they were arrested by American military police. Otani was soon released but his companion was held for investigation.
Pick was sent to be examined by Captain Dr James F. Bing, neuropsychiatrist. Dr Bing noted that the patient talked to himself and still complained of his leg injury. He ate normally, but had recently been smoking and drinking more than usual. Pick seemed otherwise to be in normal physical condition save for a ‘slight muscular twitch of the right Orbicularis Oculis muscle’. During the examination Pick constantly drummed his fingers together or tapped nearby objects. After administering various psychological tests, Dr Bing reported:
This 47 year old civilian … appears to be about 15 years older than his actual age … Although he was oriented to time, place and person, he had a great deal of difficulty performing simple arithmetic tests. For this reason psychometric examination was performed. Results of which show he had a mental age of 11 years, 9 months and I.Q. of 86 (Wechsler Mental Ability Scale). Since the patient has done post-graduate work, it is felt the poor performance of this test is a result of cerebral or arteriosclerotic or senile changes.57
Pick’s poor performance in these psychological tests may have been deliberate. In other ways he gave evidence around the same time of an animated and far from senile mind.
Under extensive interrogation by Counter-intelligence Corps officers, Pick responded with enthusiasm, reeling off names and stories and recounting a long, sensational and semi-fictional account of his life. He claimed credit for arranging the wartime release and repatriation of the American journalist J. B. Powell and of the British radio expert James Smart. He also produced memoranda concerning intelligence activities in Shanghai, the Soviet danger and anything else he thought his captors might appreciate. In addition, he claimed knowledge of a complex subversive plot of former Japanese navy officers, masterminded by Otani. Some American officials were taken in: an official telegram from the senior responsible officer of the US Counter-intelligence Corps, discussing plans for Pick to be sent back to Shanghai to face trial for war crimes, suggested that ‘in view of his extensive knowledge of espionage activities and personalities in Shanghai … careful consideration be given his case if your evidence against him is not conclusive as he may be of considerably greater value to you in the role of employee informant’.58 Investigation of Pick’s allegations produced no evidence of any untoward activity by the Japanese he had named, except for the large disbursements to Pick himself by Otani from secret navy funds and a payment of 100,000 yen to Pick’s former control officer, Ikushima, to enable him to set up a geisha house. American officials soon concluded that Pick was ‘a lying opportunist of the first magnitude and that he was guilty of double-dealing all along the line’.59
Pick was brought to Shanghai under military escort in April 1946. He was held in the Ward Road prison and tried by a special US military tribunal which found him not guilty of involvement in the killing of Catholic priests in the Philippines. The Americans then turned him over to the Chinese authorities who charged him with espionage and collaboration with the Japanese. Proceedings against him dragged on for two years. In 1948 he was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
On 1 December that year Pick submitted a long, rambling memorandum to the American authorities in Shanghai, purporting to demonstrate, with great circumstantial detail, that all his actions since his defection from Comintern in 1927 had been governed by a concern to further the interests of the United States. He accused various Japanese, White Russians and Chinese, as well as an American officer, of framing him.60 Shortly afterwards he was released from jail. The official explanation was that he had been freed in recognition of the amount of time he had already served. But according to a US intelligence report, ‘local American CIC [Counter-Intelligence Corps] representatives paid half amount squeeze necessary to effect release’.61 What motive the Americans may have had for such a payment is hard to fathom – unless perhaps they were concerned to buy Pick’s silence. He succeeded in escaping to Taiwan in early May 1949, just before Shanghai fell to the communists. Characteristically, he tried to ingratiate himself with the Taipei police, posing as an expert on Soviet communism. He also wrote to an American intelligence contact claiming that he had ‘valuable information’ about American officials who had been working on behalf of the USSR in China. ‘I lived in Asia for many years and I know all the Soviet monkey treaks [sic]’, he declared.62 Pick soon fell foul of the Taiwan authorities and was again arrested. Rumours floated that he had been liquidated but an American intelligence report in the summer of 1950 stated that he was still alive in a prison in Taiwan.63 Earlier that year he had been reported to be in possession of an entry visa to Siam.64 Whether he succeeded in making his way there is unknown. At any rate, after the summer of 1950 he disappeared.
The end of the war did not bring about any restoration of Shanghai’s old cosmopolitan character. The foreign communities soon disintegrated. Jewish refugees emigrated to the United States, Australia, Brazil and, after May 1948, Israel. About 2,500 returned from Shanghai to West Germany, the only organized group of Jews to return there from any country. At least 100 returned to Austria. By November 1948, when Mao Tse-tung’s armies began to close in on Shanghai, there were still 5,000 Jews in the city. The wealthy Sephardi plutocracy fled to Hong Kong. The Israeli government sent a consul to Shanghai to organize the emigration of most of the remaining Jews. By 1956, when the last synagogue closed, only 173 were left.
The Russians too disappeared. The Auxiliary Detachment of the Municipal Police, last relic of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (and, at some further removes, of the anti-Bolshevik military formations during the Russian Civil War), was finally disbanded on 12 September 1945. Many of the White Russians fled to Hawaii. Some, lured by the seductive rhetoric of Russian patriotism and promises of amnesty for anti-communists, returned voluntarily to their homeland. Astonishingly, even leaders of the White Russian far right, among them Konstantin Rodzaevsky, head of the Russian Fascist Party, did so; he was later tried and shot as were several of the others. The evacuation of many of the Jews from Shanghai by the International Refugee Organization in 1948–49 led to a final outburst of antisemitic feeling by White Russians, who themselves were desperate to leave before the communists arrived. A crowd stormed the office of the International Refugee Organization, demanding facilities to emigrate. In early 1949 about 5,000 White Russians were evacuated to the Philippines. Many subsequently moved on to Australia, the United States and Canada.
A few vestiges of the international character of the city remained. Until 1949 municipal decrees continued to be printed in English as well as Chinese. Some Sikh constables continued to work in the Shanghai police as they had done throughout the war. Others returned to India.
Occupiers, internees and collaborators thus all left town. Yet the Shanghai party hardly missed a beat. In November 1945 the Amateur Dramatic Society revived its production of Richard III, which had been banned by the Japanese in June 1942. The Shanghai Club was initially appropriated by the British navy, but after a while its members regained possession and the ‘long bar’ resumed its function as a strictly graduated, upper-class, white man’s watering-hole. The brass foot-bar from the floor, which had been removed by the Japanese, was restored. Holy Trinity Cathedral was restored to the Church of England. The foreign concessions were only a memory, but the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank recovered its palatial building and enjoyed the exquisite revenge of supervising the liquidation of its own former liquidator, the Yokohama Specie Bank. A new generation of American and British ‘griffins’ arrived, and Anglo-American capital once again poured into the great enterprises along the Bund. The government enacted a new Chinese company law to limit the activities of foreign-registered firms, but the Keswicks and their fellow-taipans adapted and business revived. The neon lights were rekindled and Shanghai’s night life resumed its wicked intensity.
Between 1945 and 1949 Shanghai became once again the intelligence centre of the Far East. The chief foreign players were now the Americans and the Russians, with the British reduced to a subsidiary role. As in the past, foreigners waged their secret war through local surrogates. And as in the past, the Chinese protégés of the powers refused to be mere pawns in the diplomatic game and insisted on playing independent roles and pursuing their own distinctive interests. During the Chinese Civil War, as during most of the Second World War, Shanghai remained on the sidelines of the military conflict, a bride waiting and watching while her suitors fought to the death for her hand. All the while, the guests from abroad carried on with the party, semi-oblivious to the mayhem around them.
The show went on for four more years. Then the curtain descended for the last time. As Mao’s troops surrounded the city in the spring of 1949 a chaotic flight took place. The most valuable commodity in the city, information, was sold at a high price: the archive of the special branch of the former Municipal Police, with its thousands of files on communist personalities and activities, was purchased by American intelligence agents. The documents were loaded on to a ship within range of gunfire and some boxes fell into the Whangpoo. Others had been taken in the preceding weeks of chaos and were reported to have been offered for sale to the Soviet Union by six shady underworld figures of various foreign nationalities.65
On 27 May 1949 Shanghai was occupied by communist forces. The remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s régime fled to Taiwan. Communist victory brought the gaieties to an abrupt halt. Nearly all remaining foreigners left. The North China Daily News declined miserably into a communist propaganda sheet, then faded out of existence altogether. Powell’s China Weekly Review, which had waged a gallant battle against Kuomintang censorship, lasted a bit longer by abasing itself to the New Order. It ceased publication after a couple of years, whereupon the younger Powell returned to America to face ruin after accusations of disloyalty from McCarthyites. The great British trading houses tried, at first, to adapt to the new reality but found that China’s new rulers had no interest in perpetuating their role. One by one they too departed: Jardine, Matheson in 1952, Butterfield & Swire two years later.66
Apart from Shanghai’s distinctively European architecture, little remained of the foreign presence in Shanghai. One of the few relics was the heavy roller on the front lawn of the British consulate on the Bund. The new masters of the city, not knowing quite what to do with it, left it where it stood. Forty years later a British visitor found it still there, ‘half sunk in the mud, the handle gnawed by termites, and, like Shanghai itself, decaying slowly in the heat’.67