5 Dark World

was how the United Press began its report on the virtually bloodless seizure of the International Settlement in Shanghai on Monday, 8 December 1941.1 Shanghai by that date was, in effect, an open city. On previous occasions when the settlement had faced military threats – for example in 1932 and 1937 – British, French and American forces, as well as the variegated national contingents of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, had drawn up to protect the foreign enclaves. But by December 1941 all British and American troops had been withdrawn, the small French and Italian units were not disposed to resist the Japanese, and the Volunteer Corps was not even mobilized.

By contrast, HMS Peterel, commanded by Lieutenant Stephen Polkinghorn, put up a vigorous but doomed defence. She was moored a little further upstream, opposite the French Bund. The British gunboat had been alerted by a telephone call from the British consulate in time for the crew to get to battle stations. When a Japanese officer boarded the ship and demanded its surrender, Polkinghorn responded, ‘Get off my bloody ship!’³ The Japanese disembarked and opened fire from batteries on shore and on nearby warships, whereupon the Peterel responded with her two machine-guns. Meanwhile secret code books were burnt in the boiler room. After the Peterel had been hit several times she exploded and keeled over. The order was given to abandon ship. Since the vessel’s motor launch had been hit, the men had to swim ashore, some of them being picked up by sympathetic Chinese in sampans. Six of the eighteen crew members on board were killed and all the others wounded (though the Japanese later announced falsely that no British sailors had been killed⁴). Most of the survivors were captured by the Japanese.⁵

All the captured crew members of the Wake and of the Peterel were interned by the Japanese. Several, among them Smith, later escaped but were recaptured. They were subsequently tried on the strange charge of deserting from the Japanese army and sentenced to prison terms which they served in the Ward Road jail. Two of the American sailors managed to elude capture and escaped from Shanghai to rejoin American forces. Three of the Peterel’s crew were ashore at the time of the attack; two were soon arrested by the Japanese but one, Petty Officer James Cuming, a radio operator, remained at large. In response to Japanese pressure, Hugh Collar, who had agreed to serve as head of the British Residents’ Association in Shanghai, sent word to Cuming that, if he surrendered, he (Collar) would ‘accept responsibility towards His Majesty’s Government’ – an extraordinary arrogation of authority by a civilian, though typical of the Shanghai mind in action.⁶ Cuming rightly ignored the appeal and remained underground in Shanghai under the alias ‘Mr Trees’. As a cover, the story was spread that ‘Mr Trees’ had escaped to Chungking.⁷

Shanghai’s first battle of the Pacific War was also its last. From then until the Japanese surrender there was no further conventional fighting in the city. Already, however, battle lines had been drawn for the unconventional struggle that was to be waged in Shanghai over the next four years.

Nothing further prevented the Japanese, on the morning of 8 December, from seizing the richest prize of the entire war in the Far East. Nationalist Chinese guerillas were operating near the city but neither they nor anybody else offered any resistance to the invading army as it entered the settlement. The Japanese forces succeeded within a matter of hours in consolidating their hold on the city. By 10.00 a.m. they had occupied the palatial headquarters on the Bund of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the greatest symbol of British capitalism in China. The staff were induced to hand over the keys to safes and strongrooms and the enterprise was placed under the control of the Yokohama Specie Bank.⁸ Similar measures were applied to all other British and American banks. When they reopened on 11 December, depositors were permitted to make only limited withdrawals. Crowds nevertheless besieged bank premises and long queues of customers clamoured to withdraw money. At the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank alone 2,000 people were dealt with in three hours.⁹

At the American consulate the staff had time to burn papers and code books before the Japanese arrived. Allied diplomatic and consular officials were confined to the Cathay and Metropole hotels and to the Cathay Mansions apartment block. They spent the next few months there at the expense of the Japanese government, pending arrangements for their repatriation in exchange for Japanese diplomats. The relatively luxurious living conditions of these officials aroused a certain amount of resentment among ordinary British and American civilians, most of whom suffered a rude decline in their standard of living.

Allied businesses were taken over by Japanese administrators. The Jardine, Matheson headquarters at No. 27, the Bund, were occupied by the Japanese navy which installed its intelligence department in the building. One hundred British and American manufacturing concerns were placed under Japanese control, although a shortage of raw materials forced some of them to reduce output or suspend operations altogether. The Jardine-owned Ewo cotton mill, for example, continued to operate until 7 January without interference. It was then placed under Japanese supervision and the only form of further activity was completion of existing orders. The once bustling stock, cotton and bond exchanges closed. Eighty thousand tons of British and American merchant shipping were seized.

Meanwhile, at about 4.00 a.m. on the day of the attack, the chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council, J. H. Liddell, the acting head of the Municipal Police, Captain H. M. Smyth, and other top officials of the settlement heard by telephone that war had broken out. They were called to a meeting at 6.00 a.m in the council chamber. There they met the Japanese consul-general, Horiuchi Teteki, as well as representatives of the Japanese naval, military and Gendarmerie forces. The consul-general informed them that the Japanese were in the process of occupying the entire settlement area. He asked the council members and officials to carry on in office. The British and American consuls gave their approval and at a further council meeting that evening, the Allied members agreed to continue ‘in the interests of the Settlement generally’.¹⁰

The German consul reported to Berlin that the evening session had been ‘dramatic’ and that a certain degree of dissension had been visible in the course of the day between the British and American members of the council. For the British, the idea of resignation from the council represented an affront to their traditional imperial role in the Far East, whereas for the Americans such a withdrawal represented merely a loss of their economic and political position; the Anglo-American differences, the consul explained, had been aggravated by the way in which the Wake had surrendered that morning without resistance, whereas the Peterel had engaged the enemy.¹¹

The next day the Shanghai Times published a series of proclamations by the city’s new masters. All British and American citizens, as well as Filipinos and Indians, were ordered to register at the Japanese Gendarmerie office in Hamilton House, opposite the Metropole Hotel. They were required to give personal particulars and details of all movable property and real estate held in Shanghai. In return they were issued with identification passes. Over the next few days photographers did a roaring trade in pass-photos.

The Volunteer Corps was not immediately disbanded but training was ‘suspended until further notice’ and all arms and equipment held by volunteers were called in. The British commandant of the corps, Lieutenant-Colonel G. H. Mann MC, was later reported to ‘have surreptitiously organized a scheme to turn out and arm the corps when the tide turns and an armed protective force is necessary’ – but the day never came.¹²

Eleven Chinese and English newspapers stopped appearing immediately, although three resumed publication after a day or two. From 15 December the two remaining English papers were obliged to submit to formal censorship. Japanese Army ‘News Dissemination Trucks’ drove round the city distributing leaflets that showed a caricature of Churchill and Roosevelt clinging to each other in terror at a Japanese shell. Army trucks, equipped with loudspeakers, toured the city thundering forth announcements and distributing leaflets. All bookstores and publishing houses were taken over by the Japanese. Large ‘war situation boards’, measuring 18 feet by 12 feet, were erected by the press section of the Japanese army ‘to enable the people to learn the exact news of the war situation as early as possible’ – as the Shanghai Times put it.¹³

On 30 December 1941 Consul-General Horiuchi summarized the measures that had been taken in the propaganda sphere: ‘At the start of the occupation we took over and eliminated all anti-Japanese newspapers, news agencies and radio stations. We confiscated all the anti-Japanese books in the bookstores … All the news media are totally under our control.’ At the same time, Horiuchi noted with concern that residents were listening to shortwave radio broadcasts from Chungking and to overseas stations. As a result ‘all kinds of rumours’ were spreading and the population was being ‘convinced by negative propaganda and false broadcasts’. The Japanese were therefore ‘considering taking over all the enemy propaganda institutions, making use of all newspaper and other channels to activate our propaganda, and disposing of the shortwave radios owned by residents’.¹⁴

At the end of the month the Japanese convened a meeting of prominent British and American citizens at the Metropole Hotel, where the Japanese Army established its press bureau. According to a report the next day in the Shanghai Times, ‘eloquent words of encomium were showered by local prominent Britons and Americans on the Japanese forces for their orderly and courteous conduct since their entry into the Settlement’. T. Uno, the head of the press bureau, said: ‘If any of you was involved in so-called incidents, like slapping, pushing around or bayoneting, we should like to hear from you.’ Whereupon, according to the Times report, Mr Gregg of the Asia Glass Company stood up and said that there was no reason for any American to complain about the conduct of the Japanese forces because ‘they have been behaving extremely courteous to all of us when the American Club was occupied’. An American missionary made a plea for ‘mutual understanding and goodwill’. Among those present was the fiercely anti-Japanese American journalist J. B. Powell. Towards the end of the meeting Uno turned to Powell and asked, ‘What did you expect the Japanese forces would do to you when they entered the Settlement?’ ‘I did not expect anything worse than being shot’, Powell replied, occasioning, reported the Times, ‘an outburst of laughter from the audience’.

There was more hilarity the next day at a press conference convened by the Japanese army spokesman. He warned enemy citizens not to disseminate false rumours or ‘disturbing news from Chungking’. When an American correspondent bluntly inquired whether Britons and Americans would be thrown into concentration camps, the spokesman replied: ‘The International Settlement is in itself a sort of concentration camp’, a declaration that was received ‘amid laughter’, according to the upbeat report in the Shanghai Times.¹⁵

On 12 December, members of the Shanghai Club on the Bund were interrupted at lunchtime by one of the few Japanese members, accompanied by a Japanese naval officer, and ordered off the premises. The building was taken over for the use of the Japanese Naval Landing Party. Other British and American clubs, formerly centres of expatriate social life, were similarly expropriated.

The French Concession was the only area of the city that was not occupied by the Japanese in December 1941. In his speech at the Concordia Club in November 1940, Major-General Miura had intimated that a more lenient régime was planned for French concessions in China, which, he said, would be regarded as ‘territory under the control of a non-belligerent’.¹⁶ On the evening of 6 December Consul-General Margerie received a cable from the French ambassador in Peking instructing him, in the event of the outbreak of war in the Pacific between Japan and the US or Britain, to address himself immediately to the Japanese consul-general and assure him that France would maintain a policy of strict neutrality and, in the spirit of Franco-Japanese collaboration, would repress all anti-Japanese activity in the concession. Margerie was further told that while he should fulfil this undertaking, he should avoid giving his actions ‘a spectacular character’ that could lead to trouble with ‘Anglo-Saxon circles’. Ambassador Cosme added that he was ‘aware that there is a certain contradictoriness in the above instructions’, but he declared that the only way to protect French interests in the Far East seemed to be to practise a ‘politique d’équilibre’ between the opposing forces in the region.¹⁷

Faithful to these orders, Margerie gave his ‘approval in principle’ on the morning of 8 December to the stationing of Japanese Gendarmerie units in the concession.¹⁸ The Japanese did not, in fact, exercise this right immediately. The formal autonomy of the concession was thus upheld for the time being. On 13 December Margerie issued a proclamation announcing that in the event of any acts of terrorism, the ‘notables du quartier’ would be arrested and handed over to the Japanese Gendarmerie for ‘severe sanctions’.¹⁹

In the annual report for 1941, issued by the concession authorities early in 1942, the relationship of the French Political Police to their Japanese overlords was described candidly in terms that, mutatis mutandis, might have been applied to the Franco-German relationship in occupied France:

Relations between the Japanese and the French were facilitated by the coincidence that the French police chief, Commandant L. Fabre, and the head of the Japanese Gendarmerie, General Kinoshita, had been military cadets together at the officers’ college at Saint-Cyr.²¹

The Japanese, however, were not altogether satisfied. At a meeting with Fabre in February 1942, Colonel Noguchi of the Japanese Gendarmerie gave him a ‘personal and friendly warning’ that ‘certain Japanese circles’ considered that the French were failing to render ‘the sincere and spontaneous collaboration expected of them’. Among the officials in the concession, Noguchi alleged, were ‘certain Gaullist elements or allied sympathizers’. In response Fabre could do no more than outline all that the French had done to ensure ‘harmonious collaboration with the [Japanese] Gendarmerie’.²²

Yet while subjecting the concession authorities to humiliating treatment, the Japanese found it convenient from time to time to make use of the French as a communications channel. Thus, for example, when they ordered the French broadcasting station to exercise strict self-censorship over all reports arriving from Vichy that might be harmful to Japanese interests, they also asked the French-controlled news agency Havas to supply them à titre privé with unpublishable ‘bad news’ items.²³ On another occasion the Japanese consul-general visited Margerie and asked him ‘confidentially’ to transmit a message to Chungking. The message had been written by Sir Frederick Maze, retiring British head of the Chinese Maritime Customs, ‘in accord with his Japanese successor’, and was addressed to Dr H. H. Kung, Chiang Kai-shek’s finance minister. Margerie replied that, on instructions from his ambassador, he had ceased communication with Chungking upon the outbreak of hostilities in the Pacific but that, to render service to his visitor, he would make an exception in this case.²⁴

Shanghai’s riotous nightlife sobered down, not so much because of the puritanism of the New Order as on account of restrictions on transport which prevented merrymakers from travelling out to popular haunts such as Farren’s night club on the Great Western Road. The cheap dives on Blood Alley, formerly frequented by American marines, also fell silent. Ciro’s on the Bubbling Well Road, which normally closed at 6.00 a.m., now shut at 10.30 p.m. Only along the Avenue Joffre in the concession did some semblance of Shanghai’s gaiety survive in the mainly Russian clubs and restaurants: DD’s, the Balalaika, the Kavkaz and the Renaissance. Cabarets and ballrooms adjusted to the new conditions by holding thés dansants rather than dinner dances. The ready adaptability of the Shanghai entertainment world was exemplified by one ‘authoritative source’ who declared, ‘Why, if the worst comes to the worst, and they find the daily tea dances insufficient to meet overhead expenses, what should prevent them from inaugurating breakfast dances?²⁶ Business was not good over the Christmas and New Year holidays. In mock despair, the management of the New Winter Garden advertised: ‘Practically no one comes. Come out tonight and enjoy the deep solitude!’²⁷

American films continued to be screened though late shows were cancelled: movie-goers could see Basil Rathbone in The Last Days of Pompeii at the Uptown, Bette Davis in Dangerous at the Doumer, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Lafayette. Crowds flocked to the movie-theatres, not so much to see the main features as to gape at the Japanese newsreel pictures of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The city’s industrial economy suffered a severe setback. During the first three weeks of the occupation, 162 of the settlement’s 2,310 factories were closed down. By the spring of 1942 only 55 per cent of the factories in the settlement were operating – and these with barely half of their previous workforce. The industrial collapse and the virtual absence of motor traffic changed the atmosphere of the city. ‘The air, once polluted with the smoke of countless chimneys, cleared miraculously’, wrote one observer. ‘Streets formerly grimed with coal dust became strangely clean.’³⁰ ‘Shanghai, once the world’s noisiest city, has become strangely silent’, wrote a foreign resident a few weeks later.³¹

Shortages soon began to appear in the food supply. The cost of rice soared, amounts for sale were limited and Chinese ‘fought with each other to secure purchases of the staple product’.³² Butchers were warned not to sell more than 1 lb of meat to any customer. Butter and sugar became hard to find. From 22 December onwards bakeries were forbidden to produce cakes or biscuits.³³

On the morning of 28 December, 236 homeless people were found dead of exposure in the streets of the city – though, as the Shanghai Times pointed out, ‘some allowance’ had to be made ‘for the well-known fact that many dead children are placed in the streets by impoverished parents who cannot afford even the poorest form of burial’. Some parents were reported to ‘throw their children away even before they are dead’. An official of the Public Benevolent Cemetery said, ‘Many phone calls which we receive telling us of children lying dead in the streets turn out to be not altogether correct. These children, starving, and just rotten with disease, are still alive – but always beyond recovery.’ But this number of corpses was about average for a cold winter night in Shanghai at that period. Over the previous year the cemetery had picked up 29,440 bodies in the streets; of those 20,720 were children.³⁴

For a time, traffic on the Whangpoo stopped entirely. Large numbers of vessels regarded as hostile were confiscated by the Japanese navy. The virtual absence of large ocean-going ships was noticeable, but the riverfront nevertheless soon assumed a more normal aspect as Japanese naval and commercial vessels arrived and small Chinese craft plied to and fro across the river between Pootung and the settlement. Junks carrying lumber, hay and coal again moved along the Soochow Creek. Sampans ferried clamouring throngs of Chinese refugees to larger boats that would take them up the Yangtse out of reach of the occupiers.³⁵ Waterfront pickpockets shifted their main location from the still silent French Bund to the settlement.

Meanwhile the officers and crew of the President Harrison which had weighed anchor off the Bund amidst great junketing at the departure of the US Marines on 28 November, suffered an indignity that turned into a nightmare. When war broke out on 8 December, the liner was subjected to a ‘hectic chase’ by the speedy Japanese T.K.K. liner Nagasaki Maru. The American vessel struck a sandbank near the Shaweishan Lighthouse, some 70 miles from Shanghai, and remained marooned there for more than a month. Japanese experts eventually succeeded in refloating the vessel and compelled her to return to Shanghai on 20 January 1942. The 150 Americans aboard were disembarked and interned by the Japanese as enemy aliens.³⁶

On 5 January 1942 the four Allied members of the Municipal Council who were still in Shanghai acceded to the ‘request’ of the Japanese authorities, made a week earlier, to resign. (The American businessman Norwood Allman and two British members of the council were away from the city when the Japanese attacked.) The Japanese consul-general reported that the four councillors had ‘thought it was not good for their own governments if they resigned voluntarily, so they wanted to resign at the request of the Japanese government. Their request can be permitted.³⁷ The reorganized council now consisted of three Japanese, three Chinese, one Swiss and one German member. Two days later the Japanese vice-chairman of the council, described by a Canadian official of the council as ‘highly intelligent and most capable, in addition to possessing a charming manner’, was unanimously elected chairman.³⁸

While happy to get rid of the British and American members of the council, the Japanese had no desire to accede to their Axis partners’ requests for increased representation on the international body. The Germans and Italians had proposed immediately after the occupation that the settlement be handed over to administration by a German-Italian-Japanese triumvirate.³⁹ The Japanese replied that it ‘was too early to think about’ these matters.⁴⁰ It was also rumoured that the Germans had offered, at the beginning of the occupation, ‘to arm two thousand men to patrol the International Settlement’ and had ‘also offered to use [their] own arms’. The Japanese were said to have ‘thanked them – and confiscated all arms the following day.’⁴¹

The Japanese behaved in a high-handed and insensitive way towards both their Axis allies and their local Chinese protégés. Barely a week into the occupation, the French consul-general noted that the Japanese military authorities were:

Over the following weeks Germans in Shanghai complained with increasing bitterness of the Japanese attitude towards them. German officials were particularly resentful of the freedom allowed to the Soviet radio station in Shanghai which was said to broadcast daily news items unfavourable to the German armies in Russia. Consul-General Margerie commented that it was ‘indeed remarkable that the Russian broadcasting station and newspapers continue to receive freely, through the intermediary of the TASS agency correspondent, British propaganda subventions amounting to 35,000 Shanghai dollars per month’.⁴³

The occupation of Shanghai was part of a general sweep by the Japanese through British, American and Dutch possessions in China and the Pacific. The British Concession in Tientsin was occupied on the same day. On 10 December the Japanese sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, eliminating at a stroke the British navy’s two most powerful capital ships in the Far East. After a doomed resistance, Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day. This triumph was celebrated in Shanghai three days later with a parade by a Japanese military band up the Nanking and Bubbling Well Roads. A French police report noted that it was only as a result of a ‘véritable tour de force’ on the part of a senior French police official that the Chinese (puppet) authorities were dissuaded from infringing the neutrality of the concession by holding a demonstration there as well.⁴⁴

The climax of the run of Japanese victories came in mid-February 1942 with the fall of Singapore. Shanghai marked the victory with a ‘Rally of East Asiatic People’ at the Great China Theatre. Triumphal arches were erected. A banquet was held at the Nippon Club. Japanese flags fluttered everywhere. Tramcars were bedecked with flowers. A hundred thousand Chinese gathered at the racecourse to hail the proclamation of the ‘emancipation of East Asia’ – or so the Shanghai Times claimed (the British journalist H.G.W. Woodhead later said that such meetings were ‘usually attended by only a few hundred obviously mobilized Chinese’⁴⁵). The Japanese added to British humiliation by announcing their intention to transfer administrative control of the British concessions in Tientsin and Canton to Wang Ching-wei’s Nanking government. Shanghai remained in a strange limbo – under Japanese occupation, yet theoretically still divided into Chinese, French and international zones.

In the summer of 1942 a severe cholera epidemic broke out in the city. Food shortages intensified. A black market soon started, with ‘rice rustlers’ standing in queues to buy the limited amounts available at the official price, and then reselling at a higher price. Shortages led inevitably to inflation.’⁴⁶ During the first six months of the occupation, prices rose by more than 300 per cent. In May 1942 a new currency, the Chinese Reserve Bank (CRB) dollar was introduced and residents were compelled to exchange at a rate of 2 old dollars for 1 new dollar. The new currency found only uneasy acceptance and prices continued to climb steeply. Although the Japanese seemed to succeed in curbing much of the old gang-related racketeering in Shanghai, wartime shortages, rationing and rapid inflation gave rise to new types of crime. The introduction of rice rationing in July led to smuggling from the countryside. Distrust of money values led to hoarding of every conceivable commodity – gold, medicines, cigarettes, ‘Sunkist’ oranges, even toilet paper.⁴⁷

Yet in these harsh conditions a handful of Shanghai’s residents prospered and even enjoyed life. One such was ‘Princess’ Sumaire.

In spite of the immense wealth of the Patiala family, ‘Princess’ Sumaire had been reported in mid-1941 to be ‘financially in a bad way’. She had moved from the luxury of the Park Hotel to more modest accommodation at 103 Great Western Road, Hubertus Court, Fourth Floor. Her reduced circumstances were ‘confirmed to a certain extent by the fact that she is rarely seen in leading local night haunts and hotels which was her previous wont’.⁴⁸ Yet by the eve of the Japanese occupation her wheel of fortune had turned again. She was back in the Park Hotel, albeit in a room (405) rather than a suite.

To what did she owe her financial revival? Sub-Inspector McKeown had speculated in November 1940 that ‘it is quite possible that she is engaged in highly paid prostitution’. He discarded for the moment ‘the political angle’, although he warned ‘that if her finances dwindle, she may be used by some party in which case her knowledge of India and her so-called rank may be used to advantage’.⁴⁹ McKeown’s apprehensions soon appeared justified.

On 13 June 1941, as Sumaire’s friend Auxion de Ruffe was entering his office immediately opposite the French consulate, several men who were lying in wait opened fire on him and then fled. He died on the way to hospital. His assassins were never captured. Rumour had it that the assassination had been ordered by a local French businessman, Félix Bouvier, proprietor of the immensely popular Jai Alai stadium in Shanghai. Bouvier was a Gaullist and, as president of the French club in the city, had long engaged in a bitter personal and political feud with the baron. Although Bouvier was questioned, no proof could be found against him and he was not put on trial. The police in the French Concession concluded that the assassination had been the work of the quasi-fascist, pro-Kuomintang Blue Shirts whose victims included other prominent Japanese sympathizers in Shanghai.⁵⁰

An anonymous letter sent to Sumaire three months later suggested another interpretation:

We warn you. Your running around with Fifth Columnists has completely discredited [you] in the eyes of Public Opinion. It is generally known that you have been relieved of your British passport and this fact together with your present behaviour is only too convicting [sic] for everybody that you could never be a Princess of Patiala but only a shrewd coquette. It might be known to you that persons that become too well known in China sometimes meet a surprisingly sudden death.

We shall take the liberty of dispatching a copy of this letter to the Editor of “Shopping News” and to other papers that might be interested in activities like yours.

The missive, with its crudely worded threat, was such as might have been received, read and promptly crumpled up and thrown into the bin by any high-flying socialite. But Sumaire was frightened by it – and with good reason. She was not only acquainted with Don Chisholm, the editor of Shopping News. She was also, no doubt, familiar with Chisholm’s reputation in Shanghai society as a man whose brand of gossip journalism all too often slipped over the edge into something close to blackmail.

Even more worrying was the clear threat of violence. Given the elimination of Auxion de Ruffe, Sumaire turned for advice to another lawyer, Dr Piero Terni, an Italian who was an anti-fascist and a Jew – although he did not publicize these affiliations. Terni claimed to have worked for British intelligence in Abyssinia but by late 1941 he had been engaged as an informant for the Japanese. Acting on Sumaire’s behalf, Terni lodged a complaint with the Municipal Police. He explained to them confidentially that the princess was British by birth and held a British passport which, at the instance of the government of India, had been endorsed valid only for travel to India. He further declared that she was now seeking Chinese citizenship. The police listened to Terni’s complaint politely but took no action to discover the source of the threatening letter. Sumaire clearly could not look to the British authorities in Shanghai for protection.

For an Indian holding a British passport to seek to become a naturalized Chinese was, to say the least, unusual. For a member of the princely family of Patiala it was unheard of. The Patialas were notably pro-British and had manifested their loyalty to the raj at the time of the Indian Mutiny and again during the First World War, when they supplied troops and resources for the war effort. As Sumaire’s financial lifeline from Patiala dried up, she drifted into the welcoming arms of people who offered not only money but also a new political alignment that seemed more in harmony with the rapidly developing strategic realities in East Asia.

By December 1941 Sumaire had moved definitively into political and social association with the Axis powers. Her friends were now mainly Germans, Italians, White Russians and Japanese. In late December she held a cocktail party ‘in her suite at the Park Hotel’ to celebrate the birthday of her ‘private secretary’, a young Russian woman, Olga Yakovlev. The guests included Sumaire’s Italian lawyer Dr Terni, an Italian officer, Commandante G. Galletti, a number of Japanese and various titled Germans. The collaborationist Shanghai Times published a photograph depicting the princess with some of her guests in what was clearly regarded as a highlight of the post-Pearl-Harbor social scene in Shanghai.⁵²

Another foreign resident who did well out of the opening stages of the war was ‘Captain’ Pick. A few weeks after the Japanese takeover he was released from prison at the instance of his friend in Japanese naval intelligence, Commander Otani. The hired Chinese gunman who had killed Mamontoff remained in detention and died in prison a year later. Pick meanwhile filed an appeal. The hearing was held in camera before the (puppet) Kiangsu High Court, Third Branch, in November 1942 and Pick was represented in court by a renegade half-British, half-Chinese lawyer, Lawrence Kentwell (of whom more later), who secured a reversal of the conviction.

Pick spent the remainder of the war years working for the foreign affairs section of the Japanese Naval Intelligence Bureau under the direction of Otani. Thanks to the generosity of his employers Pick exchanged his prison cell for more comfortable and commodious quarters in room 741 at the Cathay Hotel. In addition, the Japanese provided Pick with a 12-tube shortwave radio receiver, free food, petrol for his Austin car, presents, an expense allowance and a small salary. He supplemented that with much larger sums from racketeering enterprises protected by the Japanese.

A post-war American intelligence report gave the following schedule of Pick’s daily activities. He got up before dawn and listened to radio news from Moscow, Honolulu, San Francisco and London on his shortwave receiver. From 6.00 a.m. to 7.00 a.m. he made and received telephone calls concerning local Shanghai intelligence. After that he perused the local Russian papers and ate breakfast. Then he went to his office at the Japanese Naval Intelligence Bureau at No. 27, the Bund (former headquarters of Jardine, Matheson), where he wrote reports and received visitors. Occasionally he visited the Japanese Gendarmerie headquarters to supervise the interrogation of a foreign prisoner. At 1.00 p.m. he ate lunch, always entertaining a visitor. After a nap, he took some more calls and then set off for meetings concerning his theatrical, newspaper, or ‘charity’ interests. Almost every Sunday evening he ‘performed in an important role in either a concert or a play’. He would donate what he said were the profits from these shows to Russian charities, seeking thereby, as one of his Japanese colleagues later put it, ‘to suppress the antagonism of the public to his racketeering’.⁵³ After the show he would dine with friends and admirers and drink vodka in a nearby nightclub. He went home late and rarely slept more than two or three hours.⁵⁴ The Japanese seem to have had few illusions about his character but considered him a useful information source. In a post-war deposition, the head of the Japanese naval resident’s office declared that Pick was regarded as an ‘information broker’ of the type common in Shanghai.⁵⁵

At first Pick merely prepared reports on Soviet radio broadcasts but he soon became anxious to broaden his area of responsibility. In a letter to his Japanese handler on 14 January 1942 Pick argued that the Japanese Gendarmerie were incompetent to handle espionage cases and he urged the formation of a special judicial investigation section under navy control. No such section seems to have been created but Pick himself was later assigned to report on the activities of foreign nationals in Shanghai. The naval authorities were the most powerful of the various rival Japanese organs operating in the city and as a result Pick’s was a position of real influence. He used it ruthlessly to settle old personal scores. Otani several times warned Pick to keep his personal affairs separate from his official duties – but to little avail. As will be seen, Pick was eventually able to terrorize much of the remaining European community in Shanghai – and in the case of one large group to help determine its wartime fate.

For the time being, however, most foreigners, Allied as well as Axis nationals, were able to continue semi-normal lives – and in some cases to delude themselves that the occupation would make little difference. They were soon to be rudely disabused. As for the Chinese population, they did not enjoy even the minimal courtesies extended to foreign nationals in the city. Their sufferings during the war were infinitely greater than those of their former foreign masters. The Shanghailanders were at least generally acknowledged by the Japanese as fellow human beings; the Chinese were commonly treated like dogs. For the great mass of its native population, occupied Shanghai, grim, silent and fearful, became known during the occupation as a ‘dark world’.

^*Sic! The misspelling of the correct name, Petrel, was originally a mistake by an Admiralty clerk. Over the years it caused endless confusion among officials and, later, historians. But the error, once made, could not, it seems, be corrected.

^*Although British far outnumbered French members, the management of the club was in the hands of an exclusively French committee. The French club differed from the British in admitting women. Neither admitted Chinese members.

^*Shanghai had more motor vehicles than any other city in China. The total number of private cars registered in the settlement was 6,457 – among them 1,199 Fords, 595 Plymouths, 284 Studebakers, 19 Cadillacs, 14 Overland Whippets and 2 Rolls Royces.²⁸