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

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СКАЧАТЬ and baptised in 1929. But it was not until March 1938, at an extraordinary congress of the KMT in Hankow, that Chiang was finally accorded the title of Director General. This was the office through which Sun Yat-sen had wielded dictatorial powers. Chiang’s dominance of the party, but not of the country, was complete.

      The politics of the nationalist government did not, however, concern George Hogg. He and the Hankow press corps were interested in only one story – the war. The fighting was coming closer as spring turned to summer in 1938, but the conflict was still difficult to cover with any accuracy. The real front line throughout the war was anywhere Japan chose to deploy its airpower. Although thwarted in their advance on the city, the Japanese were able to bomb Hankow at will. Hogg had witnessed the after-effects of artillery and mortar fire in Shanghai. Now for the first time he found himself in the line of fire.

      In May, June and July 1938 squadron after squadron of Japanese bombers flew over the three cities in the Hankow complex at heights of between ten and fifteen thousand feet, above the range of Chinese anti-aircraft batteries. The planes flew with perfect precision in parallel lines, and first targeted Hankow’s airfield and then largely, but not exclusively, the poorer Chinese areas of the three cities.

      Writing from Shanghai, Hogg had been careful not to alarm his parents with stories about the violent world in which he found himself. From Hankow he began to expose them to the reality of what was happening around him. The adolescent tone of his letters began to change as he adapted to life under almost daily air attack. The golden boy who went to Oxford and the naïve young graduate who left to travel the world had been transformed into a hard-working reporter covering the grisly aftermath of air raids on a rusty bike. On one occasion he followed up a brief agency report that no damage had been done when a Japanese plane released its bombs over open countryside. In fact a small village had been hit. He sent the story, called ‘No Damage’, to the Manchester Guardian.

       The little Chinese house of wattle and straw stood alone on a dry patch of ground among the rice paddies. Through years it had seen nothing but the daily lives of its farmer folk and their domestic capital. Men and women scarcely distinguishable, a succession of children, a few pigs, ducks and water buffalo, had been indiscriminately sheltered – from the oldest toothless one down to the latest baby, litter or calf. But on this sunny morning something was wrong with the old house.

       Jagged cracks ran slantwise down its walls, and it was perched askew on its raised hillock like an old and disreputable hat. Evidently it had achieved sudden fame, for a crowd of excited people was milling round it, and more could be seen coming from all directions along the paths between the rice paddies.

       Nicely arbored between the two projecting wings of the house and almost entirely filling the courtyard, lay the huge carcass of a water buffalo; this seemed to be the centre of interest, but some way off a small group had discovered a pair of hairy hind legs, emerging from a bundle of red crushed meat. Attention was suddenly diverted from these as a woman raised the side of an overturned wheelbarrow to reveal a mangled human body. She held the barrow up for the crowd with one hand, using the other to help her in a mumbled incantation. The crowd peered curiously at the remains and went off in little groups to swap emotions at a safe distance; some of them threw the woman a few pennies before leaving. Meanwhile the mourners’ dirge and the smoke from burning paper money came from a half-open door into the house itself where the body of a woman, perfectly unhurt save that it had no head, was lying fully clothed on the floor. The sight of her unshrouded body, headless and thick with child, excited only a sort of pitying wonder. It was at once too near the ordinary, and too far beyond the limits of ordinary experience, to bring horror.

      Hogg was now working hard to win the acceptance of both his fellow journalists in Hankow and his editors in Washington. He was just twenty-three years old, and very inexperienced to have found himself a member of such a prestigious press corps. Like most young men in that position, he probably did not realise the extent of his good fortune. But he certainly made the most of it.

      Many of the press corps were veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and they recognised that the Japanese tactics of ‘total war’ were based on those of General Franco in Spain. Japan’s air campaign was influenced by German advisers who used methods that had already been tested in Spain. One of these was that Japanese planes always bombed munitions stores and factories before attacking military or civilian targets in a given area. The aim was to cripple efforts at reconstruction after the raids.

      As in the Spanish Civil War, the press corps did not aspire to neutrality. Thus, when on 29 April 1938, the Emperor Hirohito’s birthday, the Chinese hit back against the Japanese there was general rejoicing among the journalists in Hankow. On that day a spectacular dogfight took place over the city, involving fifty Japanese bombers supported by fighters against eighty planes of the Chinese air force, piloted by Russians. The Chinese claimed that in the thirty-minute duel twenty-one Japanese planes were shot down, for the loss of seven of their own. Russian pilots in the Chinese air force were joined by US pilots in what the press called ‘the flying foreign legion’, a motley group that included volunteers from France, England and New Zealand. They flew and fought for China for the first five months of 1938, before being disbanded due to indiscipline.

      At a time when the Chinese government badly needed propaganda victories to bolster its authority, it scored a triumph in May 1938, when its planes attacked mainland Japan. Hogg was in Hankow at the time, and he, like every other correspondent, missed the biggest story in the air war between Japan and China.

      Flying from their base at Hankow, Chinese air force crews in two giant US-made Martin bombers flew a three-thousand-mile round trip to a number of Japanese cities including Kyushu, Nagasaki and Fukuoka. The bombers, which refuelled twice on their way to the Chinese coast, only dropped propaganda leaflets printed in Japanese and describing atrocities committed against the Chinese civilian population. The need for extra fuel tanks for such a long mission prevented them from carrying out the original plan, which was to bomb Japanese bases. Details of the mission were kept secret for several days, and were only released for publicity to offset the news of the Japanese victory at Xuzhou.

      Throughout the spring Hogg worked closely with Jack Belden, who would go on to become a famous correspondent for Time magazine. Belden, born in Brooklyn and educated in New Jersey, spent his college vacations travelling the world as a seaman, and fell in love with the Far East while in Hong Kong. After graduation he shipped out as crew on a cargo boat to the British colony, and stayed on in China. He learnt the language fluently, became an English teacher and wandered into work for UPI.

      Belden possessed two big advantages over the rest of the Hankow press corps. He could speak Mandarin fluently, and he was a close confidant and friend of the US military attaché Colonel Joseph Stilwell. The two men gained access to frontline areas denied the rest of the press corps, although Stilwell insisted that the information he gave Belden was shared with them.

      Hogg concentrated on reporting the harrowing situation in Hankow while Belden, five years his senior, filed from the battlefront. It was a winning combination for UPI. For Hogg it was a compressed education, and not just in war reporting. Belden had assumed the role of his mentor. Hogg, who only a year earlier had donned mortarboard and gown to receive his degree from Oxford, was now sitting at the feet of a moody, alcoholic boss who wrote from the battlefield with poetic insight.

      The eight months that Hogg spent in Hankow proved a transforming experience. His initial orders from the UPI desk in Washington were to report on the disease and epidemics that were rife among the population. He arrived as spring transformed the city at the end of a long and bitter winter. The trees were in leaf, the gardens were in bloom and the temperatures climbed to those of England in July, although the heat was close and clammy. Rickshaw coolies stripped to the waist and ran sweating through the streets. Chinese troops switched to light tropical uniforms and the foreign community, at least the men, suddenly appeared in white shorts and jackets.

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