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

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СКАЧАТЬ the journalists’ point of view the change in weather was a boon. It increased the tempo of news, bringing epidemics of dysentery and cholera to the shanty towns and, under clearer skies, heavier Japanese air attacks. It was a toss-up as to which posed the greater threat. ‘The chances of catching malaria, cholera, and typhus are as great as those of being hit by a piece of shrapnel or of being caught in the wreckage of ancient wooden buildings,’ Hogg wrote in a letter home.

      He spent his days investigating death by disease in the cities of Wuchang and Hanyang across the river, while at night he was out reporting on the victims of the latest bombing raids. He travelled on his bicycle and on the military trucks that ferried the wounded to hospitals. With Bishop Roots’ daughter Frances and a couple of musicians he met at the Lutheran mission he formed a jazz quartet. In both Chinese and English, the group would perform impromptu concerts at schools and hospitals. Hogg had a good voice for jazz. ‘Show that man a piano and he will give you a song,’ a colleague said.

      Throughout the spring and early summer Hankow turned itself into a city under siege. Fortifications and machine-gun positions appeared at key points across the city. Large reinforced wooden gates set in concrete beds were placed at the ends of the main streets, which were lined with double rows of barbed wire to prevent the rapid movement of enemy troops through the city. The foreign-controlled concessions began planning ‘safety zones’ which, it was hoped, would guarantee the security of those inside if the Japanese stormed the city.

      This was a year before the outbreak of the war in Europe, and two and a half years before the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. The two major foreign concessions in Shanghai were still in Western hands, and like Hong Kong would remain inviolate until they were attacked and taken hours after Pearl Harbor.

      The Chinese business community believed that the number of foreigners and foreign-owned businesses in Hankow would save it from the fate of Nanjing. Every conceivable excuse was found either to paint foreign flags on, or fly them from, the bigger buildings. Large inscriptions in Mandarin and English were painted on foreign-owned offices and banks stating that the property was mortgaged to, or owned by, a foreign company.

      In public at least the communists and their senior partners and implacable enemies in the united front, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, insisted that the army would fight for the capital. The Generalissimo, as Chiang Kai-shek was known, was rarely seen in Hankow, preferring to remain in his headquarters across the river on the south bank. He had good reason to avoid open movement through his capital. The Japanese had numerous agents in the city, and had placed a large price on his head. Tokyo’s spies were not discreet about their activities. Hogg and his colleagues would watch during night air raids as rockets were fired into the sky to guide the bombers to strategic targets such as the power station by the river.

      In contrast to her husband, Chiang’s wife Meiling was to be seen everywhere, travelling on foot, by rickshaw or in her official car. Dressed impeccably, she visited schools, hospitals and factories and bombed-out slum areas. She became the public and compassionate face of a government that showed little concern for the suffering of its civilian population.

      Meanwhile, on his daily journeys across the two rivers Hogg found that Hankow’s twin cities were dying under the weight of air attacks and disease. He wrote home: ‘You can walk for hours between ruined houses in the musty smell of rotten woodwork and rubbled plaster. Here and there you will find a family camping in what was once its own home or an old woman mumbling to herself as she pokes among the ruins of her past.’

      Most of the population of the two cities had sought refuge in the countryside or had crossed the river to seek shelter on the streets of the foreign concessions. Government officials, foreign missionaries, rickshaw men, beggars and refugees moved into whatever quarters they could find in Hankow. In the summer heat the streets became a battleground between pedestrians and every kind of transport. In the midst of this frenzied city life, 330 British sailors busied themselves building barbed wire fences around the British consulate. Their gunboats were moored along the Bund and, like the Chinese troops in and around Hankow, they spent the steamy summer awaiting events.

      Most days the press would meet at lunchtime in the US naval canteen, where alcohol was strictly on a bring-your-ownbottle basis, and by night at the Terminus Hotel, where the reverse applied. The journalists took grim satisfaction in reminding themselves what had happened in Nanjing and agreeing that the Chinese efforts to hold Hankow were doomed. With the mixture of cynicism and pessimism that is a hallmark of their tribe, they speculated endlessly about what the Japanese would do once they had taken the city. Everyone else was playing the same guessing game. The brutal Japanese behaviour in the field since Nanjing had been fully reported in the local papers, heightening fears among the Chinese of what would happen if the Japanese penetrated the defences of the city, whose population had swollen to 750,000.

      In this doom-laden atmosphere Hogg and other journalists formed a ‘Last Ditchers Club’ which met regularly at ‘Rosie’s Dine, Dance and Romance Restaurant’. In every city at war the press always finds or creates a ‘Rosie’s Restaurant’. There would be farewell dinners for the ‘deserters’ who were leaving town, and bets were placed on who would hold out the longest. As it happened, UPI’s young English correspondent would be among the small group who did hold out the longest.

      While in Hankow, Mao’s chief representative, Chou En-lai, took great care to cultivate the Western press. He met journalists regularly at the Communist Party’s headquarters, and encouraged his aides to be as helpful as possible with briefings. Chou was always careful not to criticise the nationalist government, and to stick to the united front policy positions. Throughout his life the one principle from which he never wavered was the party line, and his slavish obedience made him the ideal apparatchik in Mao’s eyes. To the Western press he was a charming and skilful spokesman for the communist cause. To Mao he was an invaluable organiser and enforcer.

      Chiang Kai-shek, on the other hand, tended to regard most of the Western press corps as dangerous subversives. And in his terms he was not wrong. The collective sentiment in the foreign press corps when the war started was anti-Japanese; as the conflict continued and the united front began to crumble, so the bulk of the foreign press became more openly hostile to the nationalist government, and more sympathetic to the communists and their guerrilla armies.

      While Chou En-lai received the more important correspondents, especially the Americans, Chiang Kai-shek saw only favoured visitors such as the proprietor of Time and Life magazines, Henry Luce. The government’s trump card as far as the media was concerned was the Generalissimo’s wife, Meiling. She spoke perfect English, and became skilled at presenting the government’s case to the American public; in turn she became the subject of admiring interviews.

      In June, before the Japanese closed in on Hankow, Hogg managed to make a train journey north to Xian, and thence by truck to the new communist headquarters at Yenan. It was here that Mao Tse-tung had retreated with his forces after the Long March in 1934–35. Agnes Smedley set the journey up for him, but Hogg delayed his departure for days, torn between his desire to see the communist base and his reluctance to leave his friends and colleagues in the beleaguered city.

      Expressing these concerns in a letter home on 3 June, he also gave his parents their first view of his new friend Smedley. With schoolboy enthusiasm he wrote:

       This Smedley is a real revolutionary. She has given every penny more or less to those projects I told you of (refugee organisations), has collected thousands of dollars for them but made no provision for herself. She is known as a communist by the foreigners so they won’t have much to do with her. She cannot have Red army status because they don’t have any foreigners except doctors. Because she is known to be connected to them she cannot even get a job with the Russian embassy who are scared of getting into bad odour with other consular and ambassadorial staffs. Her new American passport which she got after great trouble from the American officials was stolen СКАЧАТЬ