Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus
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Название: Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg
Автор: James MacManus
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007362592
isbn:
The ‘Rape of Nanjing’, as it became known, to this day clouds relations between Beijing and Tokyo. Despite the diplomatic blandishments and the economic and strategic imperatives that bind the two nations in a close regional relationship there is no mistaking the deep and enduring Chinese anger at Japan’s refusal to explain or apologise for what happened in Nanjing. In seven weeks of savagery Japanese troops, under the clear control of their commanders, indulged in an orgy of rape and killing. The slaughter was carried out with unimaginable brutality. Thousands were buried or burnt alive. An international tribunal later estimated that more than 260,000 non-combatants had been killed – more than four times the number of British civilians killed during the entire Second World War.
A number of foreigners in the city, including two American correspondents, Tillman Durdin of the New York Times and Art Steele of the Chicago Daily News, witnessed the senseless slaughter. And it was senseless. There was no military reason for exacting revenge on Nanjing. Indeed, some of the inhabitants had actually welcomed the Japanese as a means of ending weeks of fighting. Nor was the wave of terror and slaughter inflicted upon a civilian population the arbitrary behaviour of drunken troops. Day after day, week after week, for almost two months, Japanese soldiers committed mass murder and mass rape with methods, and on a scale, that defy description and logic.
The Chinese decision to defend the city was also incomprehensible. Nationalist commanders first torched all the villages and suburbs around Nanjing, then ordered their troops, with no means of resupply or escape, to make a stand in the walled city. Thus fifty thousand Chinese troops were surrounded and trapped by an enemy that could bombard them at will from the air, from the river and from ground batteries. According to Tillman Durdin, about two-thirds of the defenders were executed by the Japanese after the city had fallen. Young men were hunted down, stripped of their shirts, and those found with the tell-tale strap marks indicating military webbing were shot out of hand.
Durdin, who escaped Nanjing on an American ship moored on the Yangtse on 22 December 1937, filed a graphic series of reports. In summing up what he had seen, he set the tone for much of the
international reaction to the Japanese atrocities: ‘The wholesale execution of prisoners, the slaughter, rape and looting by the Japanese after their occupation of the city all seem to belong to a more barbaric, vanished period.’ The Sino–Japanese war had begun with an atrocity that was to be repeated time and again, although on a smaller scale, throughout the conflict.
The Japanese did not take the international settlements in Shanghai until after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Old Shanghai had gone, but until hostilities between Tokyo and the Allied powers were formalised, life in the international settlement staggered on. The bar of the Cathay Hotel, the hub of all gossip and intrigue, nightly entertained the usual cast of spies, philanderers and fraudsters, sometimes all three in one. This is where Richard Sorge, one of Stalin’s most successful double agents, who certainly recruited agents within the press corps, spent his time. For four years, from 1937 to 1941, when he was arrested, he kept the Kremlin informed of Japanese and German moves in the Far East. He was hanged in Tokyo in 1944.
With the Chinese retreat from Shanghai and the massacre at Nanjing, the war entered a new phase. George Hogg had realised, as had Auden, Isherwood and every other journalist in the city, that there was no point staying in Shanghai. A new and supposedly final battlefront had formed. Chiang Kai-shek had moved his government to a new capital, and the Japanese were once again rolling their armoured and infantry columns westwards. The Chinese government prepared to defend the next major city in the line of attack, and pledged not to give it up as lightly as they had Nanjing.
The new Chinese capital, and the place every journalist wanted to be, was Hankow.
‘Hankow is the most interesting place on earth.’
Hankow was one of three cities at the confluence of the Yangtse and the Han, 450 miles from the coast. It was here, halfway down the Yangtse on its journey from the Himalayas to the sea, that Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government retreated after the loss of Shanghai and Nanjing. The new seat of government, together with Wuchang and Hanyang, was part of a three-city complex known today as Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.
The only way to get to Hankow from Shanghai in 1938 was by steamer to the British colony of Hong Kong, and then by plane or train. George Hogg left Shanghai aboard the Japanese steamer Suwe Maru on 9 March. On arrival in Hong Kong he immediately took the train to Hankow. On the two-day, five-hundredmile journey he talked his way from his highly uncomfortable third-class berth into the first-class compartments. There he met a smartly dressed Chinese businessman who sold newsprint for a Dutch firm with a branch in Shanghai. Learning that his new English acquaintance was looking for a job, the man made him an immediate offer. It would greatly impress his clients, he explained, if he took an English secretary to meetings. Thus George Hogg’s first letter home from Hankow was written on the grand stationery of Van Reekum Bros Ltd, and enabled him to describe himself as a businessman.
With equal good luck, Aunt Muriel had again used her contacts to find a rented room for him in a city where the hotels were turning away even celebrity guests. The room was in the Lutheran mission, which was run by an American bishop and Oxford graduate, Logan Roots: ‘your utter charmer, a very good fellow’, Hogg called him. The mission owed nothing to the Christian ethic of frugality, and a great deal to the large funds the Church had raised in the US. Standing on several acres on the edge of the city, it was surrounded by a moat-like canal and large red-brick walls. Within the enclosure lay flower and vegetable gardens, tree-lined walks and tennis courts. Several buildings contained classrooms and dormitories for students. The mission ran an elementary school in English and a seminary for the graduates of Chinese high schools.
The Bishop, who was within a few weeks of retirement after a lifetime in China, had good political contacts with Chiang Kai-shek’s circle. In the spirit of Christian liberalism, and perhaps political opportunism, he also entertained senior communists and rented rooms to known communist sympathisers. Chou En-lai, then leading the communist delegation in Hankow, would drop in for tea, as would the government’s Premier, H.H. Kung. Chou spoke good English, and made a point of seeking out journalists staying at the mission.
Hogg had certainly landed on his feet. Within days of arriving he wrote home to say that the city was ‘the most interesting place on earth’. And he was right. Hankow’s history as a concession port, its neoclassical European architecture and its teeming Chinese slums had plenty to interest an enquiring journalist.
The provisional capital was one of the Yangtse River cities opened up to foreign trade by the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin. The treaty had been imposed upon the Emperor in Beijing after the British inflated a minor incident into a major diplomatic confrontation. Not to be left out, the French seized on the murder of a missionary in a part of China not yet opened to the West, and joined the negotiations. Germany and the United States followed suit. Ten new ports were opened to the Western powers along the Yangtse River. In each a number of concessions were granted, СКАЧАТЬ