Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus

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      Hogg’s job with Van Reekum Bros required him to spend from 9 a.m. to noon at a smart Hankow hotel where the Chinese businessman saw his customers. His wages just covered his rent, leaving no money to buy an essential piece of equipment for any freewheeling journalist in the city, a bicycle. He was so short of money that instead of the promised fortnightly letters home, he told his parents that they would get a longer monthly letter to save on postage. He also urged them to use lightweight paper and envelopes, as he had discovered to his dismay that he was charged for items over a certain weight. It is one of the more extraordinary features of the war years in China that the postal service insisted on such bureaucratic niceties, and indeed managed to function at all. But function it did, and although some of Hogg’s parents’ letters to Hankow failed to get through, many of them did reach their destination. Letters from the UK to China went by sea via Hong Kong, and thence by train. After the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese in 1941 the main postal route to China from England was via a long and unreliable overland journey through Russia.

      Hogg tried to raise money by teaching English at the Russian diplomatic mission, and then at Hankow’s university. He signed up to teach courses in English and economics in the new academic year which was to begin in September – but by then the Japanese were at the gates of the city, and the university closed.

      However, his problems were partly solved, and his life changed, when he was offered a job as a stringer, or part-time correspondent, for United Press International. It came with a monthly retainer of US$80, a reasonable sum given that the local currency was in the grip of rampant inflation. Hogg immediately gave up his job with the Chinese businessman and bought a bicycle.

      UPI, whose motto was ‘Around the world around the clock’, already had, in Jack Belden, a famous full-time correspondent in Hankow, and from time to time the agency sent out other star correspondents, such as Betty Graham, to cover the conflict. Belden was part of Agnes Smedley’s ‘Hankow gang’ and it is probable that it was she who introduced the young Englishman to the veteran American reporter. Belden would have been only too happy to have a young trainee to do the legwork around town for him.

      The UPI job was a huge stroke of luck for Hogg. It gave him press accreditation, which provided access to people and events that were shaping the course of the war. It gave him all-important status in the press corps. Above all it gave him an education in the bedrock of journalism, news reporting. UPI had been founded in 1907 as a rival to Reuters and the Associated Press, and challenged their supremacy with livelier, more colourful stories. Roy W. Howard, the UPI chief in Washington, believed that rival agencies were far too sombre and boring in their reporting, and encouraged his correspondents to inject colour and human interest into their despatches.

      George Hogg’s UPI reports have long since been lost, but his writing for the Manchester Guardian and in his letters home show how quickly he absorbed the demands of his editors in Washington. The new job ended plans for a teaching career. For the next eighteen months he would learn the art and craft of being a foreign correspondent. It was hard work, which brought scant praise from his editors. But he learnt how to shape a short news item, and how the right quote or telling detail can illuminate and enliven the most mundane story.

      Hogg was lucky. There was nothing mundane about the story he had to cover. From the moment he set foot in China the undeclared war between Japan and China had gathered pace, providing gruesome copy for the newsmen as the casualties and the atrocities mounted.

      In May 1938 the Japanese finally took the railway town of Xuzhou. After the brilliant rearguard action at T’aierhchuang, the Chinese commanders had failed to follow up their advantage. The nationalist armies were soon continuing their retreat across central China, taking up new positions in the great ring of mountain ranges that surround Hankow and its two sister cities.

      The Japanese were now in full pursuit. Unabashed by appalled Chinese reaction to the Nanjing atrocities, and encouraged by the comparative lack of any international condemnation, the Japanese forces used the same terror tactics of mass executions of wounded and captured troops, and the mass murder of the civilian population in towns and villages, as they swept inland. Everywhere they went the army of Emperor Hirohito created brothels and filled them with Chinese women for the troops.

      In retaliation, and to slow the advance, in early June 1938 the Chinese dynamited the great Yellow River dykes, causing the river to burst its banks and sweep across the path of the advancing armies. The surging river carved a new course to the sea across the plains of Honan, drowning thousands of Japanese soldiers, miring armoured vehicles in mud and cutting rail and road communications. The loss of civilian life was massive as the floodwater swept away eleven large towns and four thousand villages. Two million people were left homeless and destitute. The number actually drowned remains a matter of controversy, but figures as high as 325,000 have been given. In military terms the tactic was a success, and the final assault on Hankow was delayed by at least three months. But, embarrassed by the civilian casualties, the nationalist government denied for years that it had deliberately breached the dykes.

      As the Japanese pressed forward Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek ordered all industrial machinery in the Hankow region to be dismantled and transported further inland. This was part of a broader strategy to remove population, government, schools and factories from the vulnerable coastal areas to the interior. It was a dramatic move. China’s economic and political life sprang from her great cities on the coast and in the river valleys in the centre and south of the country. The vast provinces of the interior, Szechuan, Yunnan, Kwangsi, Hunan, Shanxi and Gansu, were now to become the base for the fight against the Japanese. Faced with Japan’s better-equipped and -trained armies, Chiang Kai-shek had chosen to use China’s vast territory and limitless supply of manpower to engage the invader in a war of attrition.

      In the spring of 1938 Chiang was fifty years old, a professional soldier who had gained international recognition as the leader of the world’s most populous nation. But his control over party and country had never been complete, and was continually challenged. He had entered the army at the age of nineteen, and emerged from the anarchic years that followed the collapse of the Manchu dynasty^* in 1912 as a protégé of the nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen, generally acknowledged as the father of modern China. Sun Yat-sen was a Methodist Christian who had received much of his education outside China, in Hawaii. In 1912 he forged a number of revolutionary republican splinter groups into the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT), with the aim of overthrowing the old imperial order and creating a modern republic on the European model. Elected as provisional president of the republic of China a year later, Sun Yat-sen found himself powerless in the face of regional warlords, and was forced to resign within months of taking office.

      The decade that followed was one of humiliation and anarchy. Lacking any kind of central government, China fell under the control of regional warlords and foreign powers. The two men whose destinies were entwined in what would prove a long and murderous struggle for supreme power emerged from the years of darkness on separate paths to leadership.

      In 1921 a stocky young man who had worked as a teacher, a librarian, a bookseller and a journalist joined the new Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. His name was Mao Tse-tung, and at the age of twenty-seven he would abandon his previous careers and become a professional revolutionary.

      The following year Chiang Kai-shek was sent to Moscow to seek support and funds for the KMT. He returned to report that communism was simply tsarism under a different name. Russia’s real interest, he argued, lay in sovietising China. In 1924 Chiang became director of the Whampoa Military Academy, a training school for the new class of officer in a national army. It was no surprise that when he assumed control of the KMT after Sun’s death in 1925 he consolidated power in a divided party by breaking with the communists. To enhance his political legitimacy in the eyes of his party he then married Sun’s sisterin-law Soong Meiling in the same year. Meiling’s family were Christian, СКАЧАТЬ