She had had a perfectly respectable career in her two World War II years, sinking a submarine off Ireland, helping take the Japanese surrender in New Guinea. Come the peace and she was sent to the Pacific, and in 1949 she found herself attached to the 3rd Frigate Flotilla, an instrument of British imperial power that patrolled the seas in the rough triangle bounded by the western tip of Sumatra, Cape York in northern Australia, and the most northerly point of the Japanese island of Hokkaido. This was half a century ago, when Britain still kept a presence in the Far East: London felt there was much to do in the way of showing the flag and intelligence-gathering, and that gunboat diplomacy—with a fleet of cruisers, destroyers, frigates like the Amethyst, and gunboats themselves—was still the best way to accomplish this. (The phrase “gunboat diplomacy” was in fact specially coined about a century ago for patrols on the Yangtze.) In the case of China, a British naval presence on the Yangtze also enhanced the security of the British embassy in the country's capital, Nanking, three hundred miles upriver from the East China Sea.
At the time of this celebrated incident, the unfolding of which gripped half the world and all of my school, a number of Western nations—notably Britain, the United States, France, even Italy—had been allowed to patrol the Yangtze as if it were their own for nearly a hundred years. A slew of treaties had been imposed on China after the so-called Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, giving these foreign countries certain rights on the river. They were allowed to patrol it with guns locked and loaded, for the purposes of protecting their own trade, their own interests, and their own citizens.
By today's standards, it was a bizarre arrangement—as outlandish and unimaginable as, say, letting Japanese warships patrol today's Mississippi to protect a Honda plant in Hannibal, Missouri, or allowing Chinese gunboats to sidle among the punts on the Isis to look out for the interests of Beijing students up at Oxford University. But in the nineteenth century, the Chinese were powerless to prevent such arrogance by foreign traders. It was an arrangement that had gone hand in hand with the similarly bizarre concept of extraterritoriality—by which foreign citizens in the “concession areas” of certain Chinese ports could be judged only by their own courts and not be subject to Chinese law.
The two concepts—foreign naval rights on Chinese rivers and the jurisdiction of foreign courts on Chinese land—came together in Nanking in the late 1940s. Here were a British embassy and a British community in the capital of a China that was rapidly falling apart. The Yangtze, in the spring of that year (and as so often before in Chinese history), was the fault line: To the north of it was the People's Liberation Army of the Communists; on the south bank, the broken armies of the Nationalists. Caught in the middle were the neutrals— the embassies and foreign traders in Nanking, and the gunboats on the Yangtze itself. The former needed protection, if not evacuation, and these were tasks that could be accomplished only by the latter.
In March 1949 the Foreign Office in London sensed that Nanking was in dire trouble. The British ambassador there, Sir Ralph Stevenson, was nervous. As early as November 1948, he had asked Admiral Sir Patrick Brind, the commander in chief of the Far East station in Hong Kong, if he could spare a guard ship, a small fighting vessel that could bring the essential supplies that had been delayed by the civil war. It would help raise the morale of the local foreign community, and it could assist in a possible evacuation. Brind had agreed, and in March 1949 he sent a destroyer, H.M.S. Consort. Now, in April, the embassy needed another.
At first the plan called for an Australian vessel to be sent, but at the last moment, the admirals decided to bring the Amethyst up from her antibandit patrols off the coast of Malaya and dispatch her instead. She was to relieve her larger and more powerful colleague, the Consort, which had been stationed at Nanking for the previous several weeks and needed revictualing.
The Amethyst was in many ways the ideal choice. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander B. M. Skinner, had made the trip before. He had some knowledge of the ever shifting sandbars, and of the places where the so-called chowchow water could twist a small ship in half. On April 12 the small vessel set off from Hong Kong and entered the Yangtze by the Woosung Bar light on April
15. Four days later, on April 19, she began working up the river proper and passed the end of the estuary at Chiangyin. She stayed there overnight, her lights doused. She had steam up again at dawn, and at five A.M. on Wednesday, April 20, she was under way once more, into the mouth of the dragon. Everyone knew of the risks: General Zhu De's People's Liberation Army was on the left bank (as seen looking downstream), and Mao Tse-tung was warning publicly that his military leaders planned to lead their men across the great river at any moment. The Amethyst, entering so dangerous a scene, was about to make for herself a secure place in naval history, an immutable myth in the minds of a generation of British children, and a heroic role in motion pictures.
As the ship approached the section of the river where the Communists were known to be massing, Commander Skinner ordered precautions: Large Union Jacks were to be draped over the ship's sides. The guns were to be armed and readied. The speed was increased from the customary Yangtze cruising speed of nine knots to the “danger” speed of sixteen. The ship was officially a neutral and should not have attracted any hostile fire. But this was China, a country in a dangerously unpredictable mood.
As the Amethyst passed Low Island, near the end of a long north-south reach in the river, there was a sudden crackle of rifle fire from the shore. Skinner ordered his gunners to train and aim. Then the rifle fire was followed, more ominously, by the zoom and whine of shells, as a shore battery opened up. Huge splashes of water erupted off the starboard beam. More than a dozen rounds were fired. None hit the British ship. On the bridge, the officers made caustic remarks about Communist marksmanship. As the Amethyst rounded the bend and began to head due west along the river's muddy, duck-filled Kou-An Reach, the final leg on the way to Chinkiang, the order was piped: “Hands relax action stations.” The danger, it was thought, was over.
The sun was rising into a cloudless midmorning sky as the ship drew abreast of Rose Island. She was at reduced speed, and her guns were trained fore and aft. No one aboard suspected a thing—when suddenly, without warning, without any cries or flags or bugle blasts, a shell flashed across the ship's topmast. Skinner ordered his crew to action stations once more and demanded speed. The telegraphs clanged urgently, and the motors began to roar. And then, in an instant, the Communists found their aim. At least three shells slammed into the ship and exploded: One hit the wheelhouse, turning it into a maelstrom of splintered steel and wood and severely injuring the coxswain. As he fell, he pulled the wheel—and the ship—hard over to port.
The wounded vessel was now racing directly toward the thick mud of Rose Island. Skinner ordered hard a-starboard, trying desperately to correct the course and prevent his ship from running aground. At the same time, he ordered his guns to open fire. But almost at that instant, two more shells hit the ship. The bridge detonated in a ball of fire, and everyone in or near it was killed or terribly wounded. Skinner was mortally injured and would live on for two agonizing days. The ship's executive officer, Lieutenant Geoffrey L. Weston, was hit by a piece of shrapnel the size of a matchbox. It tore through his lungs and lodged in his liver. It was this man, though bleeding heavily and barely able to speak, who took command.
Weston had to watch in impotent horror as the ship slid steadily into the mudflats and then stopped dead, stuck fast, right in the gun sights of the Communist batteries. He managed to croak one urgent flash signal to the commander in chief of the Far East station in Hong Kong: “Under heavy fire. Am aground in approx. position about 31 degrees 10 minutes North 119 degrees 60 minutes East. Large number of casualties.”
Zhu De's gunners showed no mercy. Shell after shell tore into the ship, and within minutes the deck was an inferno, littered with dead and wounded men. The ship's power was cut, the radio was out, the sick bay suffered a direct hi
t, and the aft gun turret was ruined. The injured lay untended among the flames, and if not burned by the fires, they were hit by splinters from new shell bursts. For over an hour, the ship shuddered and shook under the barrage. Weston gave the order to evacuate—though not abandon—the vessel.
A small steaming party was left on board to keep the boilers ready, as well as medics and volunteers stayed to help tend the wounded. The rest swam or took life rafts to Rose Island or to shore—under a withering hail of machine-gun fire, which killed more of the terrified men as they swam. Those who made it set themselves up in the underbrush, watched, and waited. (By the end of the action, twenty-two of the 183 men aboard the Amethyst were dead, thirty-one were wounded, and one was never found.) The plan was to reboard the ship at nightfall, repair her, refloat her, and get away. The Communists stopped shelling about eleven A.M., and the river fell quiet. Everyone thought that a boarding party might come; one never did.
Why the Communists never captured the Amethyst or its sailors remains an abiding mystery of the saga. Prevailing wisdom has it that Zhu De saw the ship as a potent and valuable symbol. (Men were just pawns; ships were instruments of imperial aggression.) And perhaps in his eyes, a crippled British ship, its crew at his mercy, was a far more powerful symbol than that same ship firmly in Communist hands. The Communists appeared to regard the ship rather as a cat might a captured mouse: something to torment and torture but not to kill, not for now.
The valor of the British sailors—or whatever I imagined about them, in the jingoistic reveries of my world as a five-year-old—was seemingly without precedent or parallel. The ship's crew was briefly reinvigorated at the prospect of rescue, or as Shakespeare might have said, rebuckled and respurred. For, as anticipated, the H.M.S. Consort came in an attempt to help, speeding downriver from Nanking at an almost unimaginable speed of twenty-nine knots, flying seven ensigns and three Union Jacks. But the rescue was never to be: The Consort was caught in brutal shellfire, too. Ten of her men were killed, and she found it impossible to stop and help, her captain knowing full well that if she did so, she would be trapped as well.
The destroyer had no choice, savage though the leaving had to be, other than to blink a farewell to her crippled colleague and limp on toward the sea to lick her own wounds. The London and the Black Swan ventured upriver from Shanghai, but they also lost men in unacceptable numbers and turned back. A Sunderland flying boat made two attempts to land beside the stricken ship but was chased away by gunfire—to which a seaplane was naturally even more vulnerable, being thin-skinned and designed both to fly and to float. The Amethyst, as the whole world knew, was trapped and very much on her own.
And so she remained, a tiny gray warship held hostage to a mighty revolution's fortune, a symbol of the unfamiliar new realities of what was being called and understood as the Cold War. She was refloated, and for the first few days, she steamed about wildly, trying to find sanctuary beyond the reach of the guns, which, thankfully, for the moment, were silent. She landed all her wounded onto the relative safety of the Nationalist-held right bank, into the care of local doctors, and she would later send her dead to the bottom of the river, weighted with 4-inch shells. She dropped anchor off Ta Sha Island (“Big Sand Island”) a few miles downstream from Chinkiang and just opposite the point where the Grand Canal, the world's most venerable artificial waterway, joins the Yangtze.
There, in five fathoms of water on a good holding ground of mud and sand, the Amethyst stayed put. The hostage drama that captivated half the world was to go on, miserably, for an extraordinary 101 days. There was to be no more firing, but there was no freedom, either.
The politicians in London fulminated impotently, and everywhere diplomats tried in vain to engage Washington and other influential capitals in an effort to do something, to use such muscle as they had to win the ship's release. All came to naught, and it was swiftly realized that only those on the spot had any chance of ameliorating the situation. The assistant naval attaché from the British embassy in Nanking, Lieutenant Commander John Kerans, eventually reached the Amethyst by land and took command of the vessel. He was later to
become the principal hero of the saga. A young third secretary at the embassy named Edward Youde, who spoke Chinese impeccably (though with a Welsh accent, it was later joked), walked and bicycled to the Communist lines and tried to reason with the senior cadres of the local leadership, to no avail. (Youde went on to become governor of Hong Kong and, sadly, the only holder of that office to die in harness, in 1986.)
Locals in sampans were allowed to come to the ship's side and sell food, paltry amounts of poor stuff for high prices. The ship's oil supplies dwindled away, both from leakage through buckled plates and because of the demand for light and power. The crew's morale dropped. Rats infested the vessel; some were larger than Simon, the ship's cat. The ship's dog, Peggy, was frightened of them and hid. The temperature rose and rose.
“Things are beginning to get mighty uncomfortable,” wrote the ship's only surviving radio officer in his diary on July 22. “And I'm afraid that if our oil gets much lower we shall be shutting down again for 48 hours at a time; then it won't be uncomfortable anymore, it will be plain Hell. Even to write this I have got four sheets of blotting paper under my wrist, and it is soaked through now…. Itis beginning to get really grim.”
There was terrible tedium aboard, and above all a persistent and nagging concern that the firing might begin again or that the Communists might order all the men into a concentration camp. No one—in London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nanking, or on board the Amethyst—had any clear idea of what to do. The only plan officially bruited was to scuttle the ship; Kerans had brought dynamite and knew the location of all the sea cocks (valves that could be used to flood the hull). The survivors would then try to route-march back to the security of Nationalist-held areas or the free areas of Shanghai.
But by the middle of July, another idea was forming, quite independently, in the minds of both Lieutenant Commander Kerans and, unknown to him, Sir Patrick Brind down south in Hong Kong. Sir Patrick thought it might be possible for the ship to break out, secretly, and make a run for it. He began to send hints to the ship's commander—they could not be in code, as all the bridge codebooks had been destroyed—suggesting that plans for escape might be considered. London was officially eager for a diplomatic end to the situation and wanted no derring-do or risky maritime drama, but Admiral Brind, like Nelson at the battle of Copenhagen, had a penchant for turning a blind eye to official policy.
His hints, however, passed unnoticed, not just by the ever listening Chinese but by everyone aboard the Amethyst. They were, it has to be said, decidedly opaque. “The golden rule of making an offing and taking plenty of sea-room applies particularly” was one sentence, supposedly pregnant with meaning, transmitted by Brind. He sent it in the course of telling the ship's crew how best to weather an oncoming typhoon. It took two full weeks for Kerans to kick himself, realizing the old sailor had been offering much more than mere advice on seamanship. He was telling the commander, without letting the Chinese know, that he ought to make an offing—leave the shore—and give himself plenty of sea-room—get far out to sea. In other words: Break out, Mr. Kerans, and in short order.
Even before Kerans had deciphered the obscure hints from Brind, he had realized that escape was the only choice. Such negotiations as were occasionally going on between local British diplomats and the Communists were getting nowhere. Fuel oil was approaching the point at which he could not make the downstream journey even if he wanted to. Water, fresh food, morale—all were low. The men would soon have to go on quarter rations (they had been on half rations since July 11). And at the end of July, there would be a new moon. If there was any moment when it might be possible to slip past the watchful eyes of the Communist sentries, that would be it.
There were plenty of disadvantages. The ship, scarred and holed—the more serious holes plugged with blankets—was in poor shape. Only one of the big guns
could be fired. The charts had been covered with blood or shredded, and no one aboard had much idea about how to navigate down one of the world's most complicated and always changing rivers. The engine room had lost seventeen of its men, almost half the complement. Even if the engines themselves held up during the high-speed run for cover, would the crew?
However, a decision had to be made. Kerans wrote a cable, using a code devised over the previous three months and having to do with the spelling of names of the nearest relatives of various crew members. He gave it to the signalman and marked it with the highest of all priorities—Flash:
Top Secret. C-in-C, repeated Concord, from Kerans. I am going to try to break out at 10 P.M. tonight, 30th July. Concord set watch 8290 [kilocycles].
This last essentially instructed the H.M.S. Concord, a destroyer stationed near the mouth of the Yangtze, to act as Amethyst's floating guardian angel and to listen in on a preassigned radio frequency as the captive ship's progress unfolded.
The plans were made meticulously. If the Amethyst were to pass out undetected, silence was imperative. The anchor could not be raised in the normal way; rattling the chain through the hawsepipe would make a din certain to awaken every Communist battery from Chinkiang to the outskirts of Shanghai. Instead, it was decided to knock the pin from one of the half-shackles that held together the lengths of anchor chain, and to let the chain fall into the water vertically, with thick grease on all the ship's surfaces that it might touch. The ship's perceived shape was important, too: A silhouette could be recognized. So mattresses and awnings and hammocks were arranged along the ship's sides to make her look as different as possible from usual. She reconfigured her lights, showing green over red, masquerading as a civilian vessel, a merchantman. Talking above a whisper was forbidden; smoking was banned; no one could use the intercom, certainly not the radio.
The Cold War Page 7
