by Damien Lewis
Early one morning Jefferey took Judy for a walk in the grounds of a smart Hankow hotel, a favorite with visiting Europeans. Man and dog strolled for a mile or so along the approach road, with dense jungle stretching away to their left. All of a sudden Judy darted off into the bush. Jefferey presumed she’d scented some game animal—most likely a deer, for he’d spotted their tracks already that morning.
Moments later he heard a yelp of alarm from somewhere within the bush. He knew instantly that it was Judy. He called her, and shortly she shot forth from the undergrowth. But she was clearly very alarmed, for she was trembling from head to toe. Jefferey had never seen her acting like this before, not even after her near-death experience in the Yangtze. He called the dog to him, but instead she bounded ahead on the road, making toward the hotel and forcing him to hurry after.
As he rushed along some sixth sense made him glance over his shoulder. There in the fringes of the bush was a large forest leopard. The thought flashed through his mind instantly—so that’s what spooked Judy. It was only when he reached the safety of the hotel that Jefferey allowed himself to imagine another scenario—that Judy had picked up the big cat’s scent and gone into the forest deliberately to distract its attention, for the leopard had in fact been stalking him!
Jefferey would never know for sure which it was. But one thing was certain—whenever she sensed that her extended family was in danger, Judy was proving herself willing to risk all to protect them.
Unperturbed by his close encounter with the leopard, Chief Petty Officer Jefferey decided to make full use of their Hankow stopover to put Judy through her paces as a supposed gundog. By now she was approaching eight months old, and she’d grown into a fine-looking animal—muscular, sleek and fit, with a glistening coat, and always ready to run around.
In fact, Hankow had offered her many a chance to hone her fitness, for the various crews were forever holding intership football, rugby, or hockey matches. With both football and rugby the ball proved a little too large for Judy to master, but she had become an absolute demon at hockey. She’d grab the ball in her mouth and streak for whichever goal was the nearest, paying little heed to whichever side she was supposedly playing for. This made for an utterly impartial player, though not one who could be counted upon to boost the Gnat’s score line.
With serious gundog business in mind, CPO Jefferey organized a dawn hunting expedition. After an early breakfast aboard ship the crew—consisting of Jefferey and Tankey Cooper plus four other keen hunters—set off, with Judy taking up the proud lead. Beyond Hankow in the open bush there was an abundance of king quail—a game bird in the same family as the pheasant—and that was what the hunting party was after.
At the first sign of the distinctive birds taking to the air—a flash of iridescent blue plumage above bright orange feet—the guns roared. As quail were hit and tumbled from the sky Judy looked on impassively, making no move either to point or to fetch. The men took turns using the guns while others acted as retrievers to gather up the fallen birds, and still Judy didn’t seem to take the hint or make any moves to join them.
Finally, Tankey Cooper decided enough was enough. He bent to Judy’s eye level and gave her a little talking to, explaining what they wanted her to do.
Then he pointed in the direction of a freshly shot bird: “Good girl! Fetch! Fetch!”
Seeming at last to understand what was expected of her, Judy gave an excited wag of her hindquarters, dropped her head, and dashed off into the bush. Now and again her long white tail popped up into view over the undergrowth or there was a flash of liver and white as she bounded over the thick scrub. For a while she seemed to be making good progress, and then all sight and sound of her was lost. The watching party waited several minutes before weapons were made safe, and Tankey volunteered to go find her.
Barely had he set off when he heard an anguished howl echo forth from the terrain up ahead. He knew instantly that it was Judy, although he’d never heard her utter anything like the tortured cries she was now making. As further heartrending yowls rent the air, he dashed forward, fearing the very worst. Was their ship’s dog caught in some kind of animal trap, he wondered, or, worse still, crushed in the hungry jaws of a forest leopard?
Tankey crashed through the tall grass desperate to get to Judy, using his ears as his guide. Moments later he’d stumbled right upon her. At his feet lay some kind of pool, and somehow Judy had tumbled in. Worse still, the pond seemed to be full of a thick cloying mud from which the poor dog seemed unable to escape. As she eyed him desperately, imploring him to help, Tankey didn’t for one moment hesitate—he plunged right in.
Landing on his feet, he began to wade through the waist-deep mess. It was only then and as the thick crust that covered the pond’s surface was further torn asunder that his senses were hit by an unbelievable stench. As the crisp, sun-baked skin broke apart, so the ripe contents below were exposed to the air, along with their telltale odor. What Judy and now Tankey had leaped into here was an open cesspit.
Almost paralyzed from the shock and the overpowering, suffocating stench—that of human feces cooked for months under the strong Hankow sun—Tankey stood there for an instant and did as Judy was doing, howling out his distress. And then the realization hit him: whereas he was able to stand waist-deep in the sickening mess, poor Judy was having to dog-paddle—in effect, treading water in a pool full of unspeakable torment.
Forcing his brain and body to function—dragging his mind out of the horror of the moment—he grabbed Judy by her collar, threw her onto the bank, and hauled himself out behind her. There Tankey stood on the cesspit’s edge, his legs, the lower half of his torso, and his arms covered in a revolting slick of ordure. The gunk was all over his hands even, from where he’d grabbed Judy’s collar, plus he could feel it squelching evilly inside his boots.
But Judy was in an even worse condition: only her head had escaped immersion in the devilish pit. Using thick clumps of grass, Tankey tried as best he could to scrub off the worst of the mess. Having done what he could for himself, he turned to Judy and used the same technique to try to rub her down. But even though pointers have relatively short hair, still Judy’s coat had soaked up enough of the thick black horror that it proved all but impossible to clean her.
There was nothing for it: they would have to make haste to the Gnat, where hot baths laced with disinfectant were very much in order. With a hangdog expression on both man’s and dog’s features they hurried over to the hunting party—but none of their companions would come within twenty feet of them. Too disgruntled and disgusted to care much, Tankey led Judy back toward the harbor, a thick cloud of voracious flies marking their progress through the bush.
Long before they reached the Gnat, Tankey heard the clanging of the ship’s bell. One of those on the hunting party had clearly gotten back to their vessel before them. A voice drifted across to him as they hurried along the Hankow Bund. It was the quartermaster, calling out the sonorous chant: “Unclean! Unclean! Unclean!”
Above the ship the yellow “Q” flag had been raised—denoting quarantine—but neither man nor dog had it in them to find much to laugh at in their present predicament.
After Judy’s second bath laced with disinfectant in as many months, most of the terrible smell seemed to be gone. Even so, it was several days before she was considered done with her quarantine and fit to be allowed back into the bosom of the ship’s family. As for Tankey, he’d spent hours scrubbing himself lobster pink in a desperate effort to be rid of the last vestiges of the unspeakable ordure. During the process he’d made a momentous decision: there would be no more forcing Judy to be a gundog, that was for sure.
As the Gnat’s early-warning system, Judy had proved herself to have no equal. But as far as classic pointing duties went, Tankey Cooper had concluded that she was very much a round peg in a square hole. She might have helped the Gnat avoid the cess ship on the Yangtze, but here in Hankow she’d led Tankey Cooper into the heart of a cesspit wit
hout rival!
The Gnat’s crew saw out that Christmas and the New Year in Hankow, after which the Bee sailed into port to relieve her of her duties. So it was that in the icy months of early 1937 the Gnat turned her prow eastward to start the return voyage downriver to Shanghai.
Unknown to her crew, the Gnat was sailing into bloody trouble—as was the entire British gunboat fleet on the Yangtze. The conflict that was almost upon them would eclipse the spot of bother that the Gnat’s crew had experienced at the hands of the Yangtze River pirates or indeed anything that had ever gone before.
Shortly, Judy of Sussex would be called upon to save their lives many times over.
Chapter Five
Late in the spring of 1937 the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces made their move. In the northeast of the country, around Peking (now Beijing), the Japanese military began maneuvers involving large numbers of ground troops. Tensions mounted inexorably as the Chinese military commanders watched what was unfolding and shadowed the Japanese soldiers’ every move.
Finally, during a night exercise by Japanese forces around the strategically important Marco Polo Bridge—an ancient granite span lined with fantastic carved dragons that crosses the Yongding River, providing a crucial access point into Peking—shots were exchanged. What began as confused, sporadic exchanges of fire rapidly escalated into full-scale fighting, with soldiers hit and wounded on both sides.
This was the excuse that Imperial Japan had been waiting for. Japan demanded that all Chinese troops withdraw from the area—in effect, ordering the Chinese military to vacate its own sovereign territory. When the ultimatum wasn’t met, the Japanese military launched an all-out offensive, bombarding Peking’s port city of Tientsin (now Tianjin). Under fierce air and land attack both Tientsin and then Peking itself fell to Japanese forces in late June 1937.
So began what was to become known as the Second Sino-Japanese War. Age-old belligerents, the two nations had first resorted to all-out conflict in 1894. During a year of intense fighting the Japanese had scored a string of victories, and China’s Qing dynasty had been forced to sue for peace. Now, barely four decades later, conflict had again engulfed these two ancient adversaries.
China’s nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, was quick to retaliate against the Japanese aggression. He directed the army and air force to counterattack against those Japanese forces based at the mouth of the Yangtze River in Shanghai. It was August 13, 1937, when war erupted in the port city—and the Paris of the East was engulfed in fire. Months of intense conflict lay ahead during which 200,000 Japanese troops, backed by air and sea power, would do fierce battle with the ill-equipped but spirited Chinese defenders.
If Shanghai fell, it would open up the entire length of the Yangtze to the Japanese, and the Chinese commanders knew full well what their next target would be—their capital city, Nanking, about 300 kilometers inland. Desperate to save Nanking, the Chinese strung a boom across the mighty Yangtze, one made up of what few warships they possessed interspersed with junks transformed into makeshift gunboats and with thick bamboo hawsers strung between them.
The aim of the boom was to block any Japanese warships from moving upriver, but in placing it the Chinese had unwittingly cut off thirteen British gunboats from the sea, plus six American and two French vessels. Among them was the Gnat, complete with her crew and ship’s dog. None of the gunboats had any way of escaping the warfare that had erupted at the mouth of the great river that they had for decades patrolled with such freedom.
After weeks of bloody street-to-street fighting Shanghai fell. Though beaten back from the city, Chinese forces had won a propaganda victory of sorts. Imperial Japan had openly boasted that it could take Shanghai in three days and all of China in as many months. In reality, it had taken them three months of intense fighting—with heavy casualties on both sides—to seize the city at the mouth of the Yangtze.
As Chinese forces fell back from Shanghai, the Japanese were able to break through the boom across the Yangtze. But there was little relief for the crew of the Gnat or for those of the other gunboats. At a point halfway to Nanking a second boom was thrown across the river, and once more the Allied gunboats were trapped within a bloody conflict not of their making. Thus far none of the ships or their crew had fallen victim to the bloodshed, but they were hostages to fortune and few believed they could avoid its predations forever.
With the Japanese pushing inland, Rear Admiral Reginald Holt, the commander of the British gunboat fleet, tried to negotiate safe passage for his flotilla through the boom and out to sea, but to no avail. Japanese land forces were moving to encircle Nanking, and a massive aerial bombardment of the city had begun. By now it was early October 1937, and the Allied gunboats—the Gnat included—resorted to painting large national flags on their upper sides in an effort to avoid getting pounced upon by marauding Japanese warplanes, which daily swept the lower reaches of the Yangtze, seeking targets.
At the same time that Japanese troops closed in on the Chinese capital, reports of terrible atrocities reached the gunboats. Civilians were being tortured, raped, and massacred in the thousands. In the face of diehard Chinese resistance, the Japanese Army had been ordered to implement the “Three Alls” policy—kill all, loot all, destroy all. With the noose tightening around Nanking, the Three Alls were about to be put into practice, with terrifying consequences.
The British and Americans—the two closest of allies, united by a common language, ancestry, and culture—often performed joint patrols on the Yangtze, including antipiracy missions, bandit sweeps, and rescue operations. Increasingly, the two fleets reacted to the mounting danger by grouping river traffic into convoys, each protected by as many British and American warships as could be mustered.
In the process, the crew of the Gnat struck up a fine friendship with the crew of an American gunboat, the USS Panay. One evening during a break in the patrols, the ships’ crews rendezvoused at a riverside canteen. The beer began to flow, and the sailors’ voices raised the roof in song. The American sailors took a real shine to Judy, especially when she threw back her head and yowled along to their sea chanteys, making herself the center of attention.
But by the time Tankey Cooper had navigated his inebriated way back to the Gnat, he’d realized that Judy was no longer with him. The ship’s dog being missing, he sobered up quickly enough. Sailors searched the Gnat from stem to stern, but there was zero sign of her. They flashed a signal from their bridge via the Aldis lamp, asking their fellows aboard the Panay if they had seen her. The reply that was signaled back was “Sorry, no trace of her here.”
Tankey was not the only member of the ship’s crew who got precious little sleep that night. He blamed himself for not keeping watch over Judy, but in truth she was the ship’s dog and every man among them should have kept a proper eye out. But the following morning all seemed to be much brighter, if a little more sinister at the same time. The Gnat’s Chinese boat boys had heard a rumor that Judy was safe and sound—and hidden aboard the American gunboat!
“So that’s how they want to play it,” Tankey growled upon learning the news.
He and his fellows spent the day plotting revenge. When darkness fell that evening a sampan stole alongside the USS Panay. Two fleeting figures crept aboard, and when they judged the coast was clear, they seized their chance. Their business being done, they slipped back into the shadows of the sampan, and it pulled away from the American gunboat, heading for the Gnat.
Shortly after dawn a signal was telegraphed from the USS Panay to the British gunboat: “To Gnat: boarded at night by pirates. Ship’s bell stolen.”
The reply from the Gnat read as follows: “Gnat to Panay: we also pirated—of Judy. Will swap one bell belonging to USS Panay for one Lady named Judy property of officers and ship’s company of HMS Gnat.”
Within the hour Judy was back aboard the British ship, and the quarterdeck of the USS Panay was once again graced by the ship’s bell. No one—not even the U.S. Navy—was abo
ut to part the gallant seamen of the Royal Navy from their ship’s dog. But such high-spirited japes belied the extent of the threat now menacing the Yangtze. Shortly, the gunboats were to fall victim to the rising Japanese aggression—the USS Panay foremost among them.
On December 11 Japanese land forces unleashed their ire against their first Allied target: the British gunboat and sister ship to the Gnat, HMS Ladybird, plus the vessels she was protecting. Ladybird was anchored off Wuhu, watching over several British steamships. Without the slightest warning and under zero provocation, Japanese warplanes streaked out of the skies and unleashed their bombs, returning for a second time to strafe with machine guns.
One British steamer was sunk, and another badly damaged. The radio message that Ladybird sent to the flagship, the Bee, anchored upriver near Hankow, left no doubt as to the seriousness of the situation. Immediately the Bee set sail to come to her aid, but she was too late to prevent the Ladybird from being fired upon by Japanese shore-based guns at little more than point-blank range.
HMS Ladybird was hit repeatedly, and the onslaught ended only when she was able to steam far enough downriver to put herself out of reach of their fire. But the damage was done. Sick Berth Attendant Terence Lonergan had been killed outright, and not an officer aboard the Ladybird had escaped without injury. By the time the Bee reached Wuhu, she too came under attack and was able to escape serious damage only by repeatedly dodging Japanese shell fire.
Meanwhile, lying off besieged Nanking, the sister gunboats HMS Scarab and Cricket were guarding a fleet of British cargo ships when yet more Japanese warplanes appeared from out of the sky toward the east. By now Ladybird’s timely warning had been transmitted to all British and Allied shipping on the Yangtze: The Japanese were on the warpath, and all vessels were to be on high alert for hostile acts. The British gunboats were primed and ready.
