Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Mel suspected that Chinese leaders, wanting to keep the rest of the world from knowing that the fate of the country’s central government had rested on the Communists’ actions, were keeping that part of the story away from newspapers back in the United States and elsewhere.

  Mel and Harry wanted to see the site of Chiang’s kidnapping itself, so the next morning they rode on the floor of a packed bus for a jolting forty-five-minute trip to the Huaqing Pool, the cave-hewn hot springs resort where Chiang was held. Government officials were already constructing a monument to the incident. Fitch had also suggested that he might be able to get the boys into Yenan, which was a two-day drive from Sian.

  But as soon as Mel and Harry returned from the Huaqing Pool they learned about a new crisis across the country that would keep them from visiting Yenan. This crisis marked what many now regard as the beginning of World War II in Asia. It erupted just southwest of Peiping, another former capital, after six years of simmering tensions and occasional skirmishes that had followed Japan’s invasion of Manchuria.

  The fighting began along the banks of the Yongding River, where an eight-century-old arched span of white granite called Lugouqiao, or the Marco Polo Bridge, crossed its waters. Along each side of the bridge, there were stone rails that held the grinning faces of 501 sculpted lions. The mirth and joy carved into the statues contrasted sharply with the seriousness of the crisis approaching from either side of the river. The bridge separated two armies: the Chinese 29th Route Army, garrisoned behind the ancient walls of Wanping, a fortress at the east end of the crossing, and a company of Japanese soldiers camped on the other side.

  On July 7, the commander of the Japanese contingent claimed that one of his soldiers had gone missing. Treaties signed after the 1900 Boxer Rebellion had given foreign powers—Japan included—the right to station troops in China as protection for their nation’s interests in the country. Invoking these agreements, the Japanese commander demanded that he be allowed to search Wanping for his missing soldier. When China’s 29th Route Army commander, Song Zheyuan, refused the Japanese commander’s demands, shots rang out from both sides. Early the next morning, Japan reinforced its garrison with machine-gun units and armored vehicles, then again opened fire on the bridge and Song’s army, which lost scores of soldiers.

  The Japanese used the incident and Song’s intransigence as a rationale for a full-scale attack on Peiping. The question then became whether Chiang Kai-shek—who was at a summer resort in the mountains southwest of Nanking—would leave Song Zheyuan to handle the Japanese on his own or back up his general with the full force of his military. Such a response could plunge underprepared China into full-scale war with Japan.

  The Kuomintang maintained a far-from-definitive hold on China, and the Lugouqiao incident tested the party’s unity with the Communists. It wasn’t clear who would join Chiang if he went to war. Japan had controlled much of northern China since it invaded Manchuria in 1931, while political rivals of Chiang’s controlled other Chinese provinces and the militaries within them whose support Chiang would need for a full-scale war. On the other hand, if Chiang backed down, his inaction could embolden Japan.

  “If it were just [Peiping], that would be one thing, but Chiang feared that the city would be just one more conquest in an ever-lengthening list of Japanese provocations in China,” the scholar Rana Mitter later wrote.

  And Chiang knew he was unlikely to receive international assistance. Europe was occupied with the Spanish Civil War and the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy. The United States, still reeling from the Great Depression, in addition to its memories of the First World War, wanted little to do with another distant struggle, yet less with a continent that policymakers, the media, and the public continued to discuss through Orientalist stereotypes. Few international powers wanted to be drawn into a messy regional dispute, one from which they could gain little, and it was highly unlikely that President Roosevelt would get American troops involved in China when he hadn’t intervened in Spain.

  “To return to a war in Europe would be unpopular; to enter a conflict in China was close to unthinkable,” Mitter wrote of U.S. foreign policy. “So if Chiang wanted to fight back against Japan, he would have to do it on his own.”

  Mel and Harry had no clue that any of this was happening until they reached Taiyuan, the capital of Shanshi Province (Shanxi), but the trip to Taiyuan gave them a glimpse of the high tensions in China. When they crossed the Yellow River in T’ung-Kuan (Tongguan), a Chinese customs official checking Mel’s passport froze when he saw the visa for Mel’s upcoming Japan tour. Because Japanese troops occupied nearby Inner Mongolia, local officials were nervous about spies, and this official was immediately suspicious of Mel and Harry. It didn’t matter to him that they weren’t Japanese.

  “Anti-foreign feeling is strong and the countless officers about us have loaded guns which I am sure they wouldn’t hesitate to use on us,” Mel wrote after the official grudgingly let the students pass.

  By the time Mel and Harry arrived in Taiyuan on July 11, the rumor mill had transformed the skirmishes outside Lugouqiao into full-scale attacks on China’s main strategic corridor, a trunk rail line that connected Peiping to Hankow (Hankou, now part of Wuhan). The students were given wildly inflated reports that more than 1,000 soldiers had already died in the battle. The fear was that if Japan seized control of the railway, it could send troops stationed in Korea and Manchuria into the heart of China. Such an attack hadn’t actually happened (Japan did make a few small air strikes on the rail line), but Mel and Harry couldn’t get any solid information about what was going on because communication lines between Peiping and China’s interior were down.

  “All we did find out was that we couldn’t go directly to Peiping from there and would have to take a round about route,” Mel wrote the day after they reached Taiyuan. They had hoped earlier to catch a flight on a German Junker that they’d heard was in Taiyuan and scheduled to fly to Peiping, but once they reached Taiyuan they discovered that Peiping’s airfields were closed, so that option was out. As they realized that full-scale war could strand them in China’s hinterlands, they also realized that they were running out of local currency. With war a looming possibility, nobody was willing to exchange currency, so Mel and Harry had to cobble together what money they had left to pay for an alternative, indirect train journey to Peiping.

  The first night of their trip—an uncomfortable one—got them only as far as Yuanping, a “mud village with a bus station,” about fifty miles north of Taiyuan. The next day’s journey brought them to Kalgan (Zhangjiakou), a city bordering Inner Mongolia and surrounded by the Yinshan Mountains. Mel and Harry could see the Great Wall of China from Kalgan. They hoped to hike to it early the next day, but a messenger arrived from Peiping just before they left. He told the students to get to Peiping immediately, before the fighting there worsened and made travel even more difficult.

  “Feel we had better get in there now as only one gate is open, streets are barricaded and this may be our last chance,” Mel wrote before boarding a midnight train to Peiping.

  Chapter 2

  “THE ITCH IS PERPETUAL”

  The next morning, July 14, 1937, Mel and Harry arrived at a railway station near the south wall of Peiping’s old city. They then entered through the city’s only open gate. The crackle of machine-gun fire and the thunderous drumbeat of distant artillery were constant for the next two days. Since Mel had arrived in China, he had watched the first stirrings of the conflict seethe beneath the quivering trigger fingers of paranoid officers in the country’s interior. He had heard murmurs of antagonism around charcoal fires in rural schoolyards, where children chanted, “Down with Japanese imperialism.” Propaganda posters depicted Chinese soldiers standing up to vicious-looking tigers, beastly stand-ins for the Japanese. Now, after July 7, the occupation had begun in earnest.

  All-out war was not yet certain, but the crisis had paralyzed the entirety of Peiping’s ro
ughly twenty-two square miles. Mel and Harry hired a rickshaw to take them to the American legation. Its driver had to weave around roadblocks that had been placed in the streets to reach the College of Chinese Studies, where they planned to stay. (A year earlier, a relative of Mel’s stepfather had introduced him to the school’s cantankerous president.) With the city under martial law, its roads would be empty come nightfall. Despite the stifling heat of summer, a 9:00 P.M. curfew kept residents indoors.

  On the outskirts of Peiping, Japanese troops worked tirelessly to build a giant airdrome. It was already clear that this war would be fought from the sky. Mel guessed that Japan’s low-level flight patrols over Peiping were calculated propaganda efforts meant to display the empire’s airpower and instill fear in city residents. They succeeded.

  This was not a safe time to be an American in China, though Mel did his best to assure his parents that the situation wasn’t as “exciting as it sounds.” Harry Caulfield’s mother, worried that the conflict would strand Harry and Mel, had pulled strings and directly contacted Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

  Hull acknowledged the violence—500 American Marines were marching in full-dress uniform through the American legation, with many patrolling its crenelated walls—but the State Department, he said, wasn’t yet concerned. He stressed that the American mission in Peiping endeavored “to afford Americans all practicable protection.” If conditions worsened, the embassy would give Americans sufficient warning of any danger and facilitate their departure.

  “Home papers must be full of [what’s] happening,” Mel wrote. “Imagine the danger for foreigners is over rated, but the activities couldn’t possibly be.”

  Within a few days of Mel’s arrival in Peiping, there were still occasional bouts of gunfire in the distance, but the gunshots and artillery barrages had subsided and both the 29th Route Army and the Japanese North China Garrison Army had moved away from the Marco Polo Bridge. Local leaders on each side were discussing a tentative cease-fire, but both Chiang, who was meeting with his military council when the attack at the bridge happened, and newly appointed Japanese prime minister Prince Konoye Fumimaro were preparing for war. Despite what he called “absurd” demands from Japan that China turn Hopei (Hebei)—the province surrounding Pieping—and neighboring Chahar into autonomous provinces, Mel doubted that Chiang Kai-shek would respond by declaring war on Japan.

  “I am convinced that China is far from ready,” he wrote from Peiping. “On the other hand, if foreign power intervenes to keep peace at any cost they may tell China to give in. If China gives into these demands she is about finished for a long time. It will mean Japan will repeat six months later a bit further south and so on until they reach Canton.”

  As more time went by, Mel surmised that Japan was stalling in order to rush more troops and equipment closer to Peiping.

  “The Japanese are rotters for this every last one of them,” Mel wrote. “They care little for anything and laugh at the foreign powers.”

  While negotiations continued, the crowds returned to Peiping’s streets, but they mostly consisted of people trying to stock up on supplies and merchants trying to clear their stores of goods before it became impossible to do business. Occasional truckloads of troops raced through the city’s streets, but it was never quite clear where they were going. Mel, meanwhile, was curious whether the government in Nanking was biding time as it reinforced its positions around Peiping. If that was indeed the case, he was certain that Japan would interpret such reinforcement as an act of war and strike back.

  Mel, Harry, and other Lingnan friends who had arrived separately in Peiping took advantage of the relative calm to visit the Summer Palace, Yenching University, and the Temple of Heaven. Other cultural sites were cut off because they had been closed and turned into staging grounds for Chinese troops, but Mel made the most of the trip and used a 16-millimeter camera to film the landmarks he could see. He also photographed the sandbags piled high along the walls of Beijing’s hutongs—alleyways lined with courtyard residences and businesses—and the helmeted troops marching in the city’s streets. Meanwhile, at Yenching, Mel met with journalism professors and local newspaper editors.

  Among those Mel met was F. McCracken “Mac” Fisher, the United Press’s correspondent in Peiping. He also met up with a Fox Movietone producer to learn what it might take to make newsreels in China.

  “I would like to attach myself to some news agency,” Mel wrote, though he was also realistic. “The chances are slim. I have no connections here for inside dope, and the town is full of news hawks.”

  Mel knew that he was in the midst of a geopolitical crisis, and that it wasn’t being covered well in America. He was already hooked on China, and now he was starting to get hooked on the drama of a possible war, on the international intrigue, and on the history being written around him. These meetings gave him a tantalizing preview of what it might be like to write that history himself.

  “You probably wonder why I don’t get out of here while the getting is good,” he wrote. “Frankly, I don’t know why except I am fascinated by the hopes of seeing what is going to happen.”

  While he was in Peiping, Mel heard many stories about Japanese soldiers harassing Westerners in the city.

  “They have the guts to destroy cameras of Americans and English even in this city if they want to and no one calls them on it,” Mel wrote. In Shanghai he had heard similar rumors, and he had been warned by Western police in that city not to photograph Japanese military. Undaunted, when Mel went to the Japanese embassy to see if, given the current crisis, he would still be able to travel to Japan, he brought his camera along, hoping to take pictures of the Japanese legation’s fortifications, barbed wire, and heavily armed troops.

  Melville Jacoby enjoyed photography and filming 16mm motion pictures as much as writing. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  Only two days after guessing that China wasn’t ready for war, Mel revised his predictions. He now thought war was likely because Japan’s demands were “as preposterous as she is imperialistic.” He thought China was held back only by its lack of military readiness and its economy; however, there was plenty of patriotism among the Chinese population, who desperately wanted to repel Japan.

  Mel began to sour on the idea of visiting Japan after its belligerence in China. It didn’t help that Japanese officials questioned him for hours when he went to their embassy to pick up train tickets the day before he left, or that guards with bayonets “none too comfortably” escorted him around the complex.

  Nevertheless, the next day, July 23, Mel boarded another train, this time to travel to Japan by way of occupied Manchuria and Korea. To get to the train on time he had to leave so early in the morning that he violated the city’s curfew. His rickshaw driver had to sneak around military checkpoints and take routes off the city’s main streets.

  Mel was barely out of Peiping when he got his first real glimpse of what the Japanese empire was up to in China. As his train passed through Fengtai, the southwestern Peiping district that was home to Wanping Fortress and Lugouqiao, Mel saw Japanese soldiers digging trenches and installing field guns. Mel guessed that there were thousands of them.

  As Mel’s train continued through Japanese-occupied Korea, guards kept his compartment curtains drawn. Still, Mel was occasionally able to peek out the windows. He glimpsed other trains full of troops and tanks that screeched and clattered by in the other direction as his own train stopped at rail sidings to let them pass. He also saw bent-backed peasants toiling in rice paddies, coal mines, and clear streams. At one station stop he saw crowds of Japanese citizens banging drums and cheering soldiers who were arriving on other platforms.

  “They are pouring them up there it seems,” Mel wrote. “Enthusiasm knows no bounds even in Korea.”

  The next morning guards on the train pulled Mel into the first-class car. When he arrived, a train conductor was taking the film out of a European passenger’s camera. The conductor then turned to Mel and
insisted, through limited English, that he had been taking pictures of bridges and other strategic installations outside of Peiping. He and the guards lightened up after Mel mentioned an officer in his car who he’d spoken with earlier that day and who could vouch for him.

  “The few other foreign passengers are laughing themselves sick at my troubles,” he wrote. “I am beginning to think now that I am a spy myself.”

  Save for some intense questioning when Mel arrived at Japanese customs at the Korean port of Fusan (Busan), the journey proceeded without further incident. But once in Japan, Mel found himself under constant surveillance. Government agents in plain clothes and dark glasses tailed him wherever he went. For a while, he devised “hide-and-seek”–style games to try to evade his followers. In one city, he tired of pretending not to notice the surveillance and approached one of the agents directly to invite him to lunch.

  On July 26, Japan launched an all-out assault on China. Every Japanese city Mel visited had nightly air raid drills, some of which even involved simulated poison gas attacks. By day, Japan’s citizens crowded the city streets to cheer the soldiers marching off to war. Mel initially thought the hoopla, as the masses chanted and whipped themselves into an anti-Chinese fervor, was genuine, but he came to suspect the government’s hand in the frothing crowds he saw throughout Japan.

  “Propaganda is scattered the length of Japan,” Mel wrote. “Strict censorship of the press keeps the people under the illusion that they are fighting a defensive war and that the sympathy of the world is with them. War enthusiasts are the militarists and the youth.”

  Mel’s trip finally ended, after three weeks, in Yokohoma. He’d caught up with Harry Caulfield and their friend Eugene Johnson in Kyoto, and they traveled home to California together aboard the 583-foot-long, 17,000-ton Chichibu Maru.