There we were informed that, the day before, an American inspection team made up of an American colonel, a Chinese colonel, a Chinese interpreter, and an American captain had arrived in a jeep wanting to see the front. The liaison team warned these sightseers that they were already very close to the Japanese, but the American colonel had not been impressed. He wanted to see some fighting, so they set out in their jeep again, looking for Japanese along the unpaved highway to the last point held by Chinese regulars. A Chinese squad leader tried to stop them, but no Japanese gun positions were in sight, and no one heard any gunfire. Ignoring the warnings, the colonel continued on.
Another jeep drove up to our little group. In it were Teddy White, the famous Time correspondent, and a Life photographer. They seemed happily relieved to see us and we sat around in the broken-down little courtyard. There was one embarrassing moment for me, though, since before he had been identified, I asked him, “Do you know Teddy White is coming?
He replied, “I am Teddy White.”
After talking for a time, we all started out for the place where the inspection team from Washington had last been seen.
We arrived at their last known position and made no further progress for two or three days. Water had to be boiled in big gas cans, and the day’s heat was compounded by the fires. I was filthy. My clothes clung to me, and it was a tremendous effort to shave. At night we listened to the Air Force radio, which was powered by hand pumping.
The Air Force liaison officer and his men rode with Poland and me in one jeep, while White and his photographer followed us in theirs. We had passed more burnt-out bridges but nobody was around and we saw no jeeps. A burnt-out building stood to one side of the road, and a little stone shed was on the other. Rice paddies ran up to the side of the road, bordered with damp gullies. Mountains rose a few hundred yards off to the side. We got out of the jeeps and looked for farmers to talk to. At the foot of the hills were a few small villages. The first one was completely deserted. The Japanese had lived in it; we found scraps of uniforms and rifle cartridges. Narrow pathways ran between the mud buildings. The enemy had just left. Maybe he still lurked around the corner.
Cy Poland was an absolutely reliable and extremely capable soldier, and most amazing of all was that he was a cousin of my old Chicago love, Nancy Ashenhurst. Anyway, Cy went back with his two or three men and me to where the jeep had stopped and examined the nearby building. I walked into the barnlike structure and immediately a horrible smell washed over me. There was a pile of straw in one corner. A hugely bloated, burned corpse lay on top of it. I couldn’t tell if the body was Japanese, Chinese, or American. We decided that the shreds of uniform left indicated that it was Chinese. Then we left the area and drove back to our temporary camp. We had found a body, but we had not found our missing men. We probed further the next day, but White was no longer with us. He had gone back to Kunming in order to send his dispatch back to Time.
The rest of us stood in a little group on the road and there our search ended. One of the men kicked at a pile of dirt in the gully, and suddenly a cadaver was uncovered. Maggots swarmed over the face, and the skull was almost completely devoid of flesh. A few feet away we found another corpse in the same condition. Poland and I photographed the remains.
Trying to make identifications, we decided the first was the Chinese interpreter, and the second the American colonel. As it turned out, we were wrong. The American colonel and his aide, an American captain, had been captured alive. We gave our film to the infantry liaison people and moved on. A week later the missing American colonel wandered back into an outpost. He had escaped, he said, but the captain had not.
Shortly after these events, I wrote a letter home from Kweiyang on quite another subject. An incredibly sad one it was:
April 14, 1945
The news of the death of President Roosevelt came as a terrible shock yesterday. It was just about the worst news since the war began. I think that Roosevelt was the greatest American since Lincoln, and if ever the world needed him, it is now. Truman is faced with a tremendous responsibility and I hope that everybody co-operates with him. … The news of the tremendous advances against Germany continue to flow in and it seems impossible now that the war can last much longer in Europe.
While FDR did not live to see it, the end of the war was getting closer. Every night we pitched our hammocks a little farther down the road as we headed for the big city of Liuchow, which had once been the site of the biggest American airfield in China. As we neared, Chinese troops encountered a small number of entrenched Japanese. But the Chinese did not seem eager to engage the enemy at close quarters and contented themselves with firing at the enemy position with artillery. Had the Chinese commanders made a real push they could have prevented some of the damage the Japanese were doing to the town and its people. But the generals were taking no chances with their personal safety.
We felt compelled to make a move. Didn’t the saying “save face” start here? By deciding to walk toward the Japanese, we thought, we might shame the Chinese into following us. Stilwell had done that when crossing the Salween River into Burma, but Stilwell was a four-star general who knew what he was doing. We believed the Japanese only had small arms and we could walk quite a way before moving into their range. A railroad track cut across the area in front of us, on a rise, providing cover almost up to the Japanese entrenchment. It was an extremely hot day, and we did not want to carry any unnecessary objects, including weapons. A little while later I was most sorry we had left them behind. The Chinese glared at us as we walked nonchalantly out, but they said nothing. Soon we were between them and the Japanese. We came to the railroad tracks and halted. Once past the tracks, we would be within range of the enemy rifles. However, thick foliage on the other side of the tracks hid us as we crossed. We raced over the top of the abutment and into the trees on the other side, creeping cautiously for a few moments, still advancing on the Japanese.
Then bullets began cracking over our heads. We dove into tall grass and stopped dead. We did not know if the shots were meant to hit us or not, but began to wonder what exactly we were doing. We didn’t have so much as a penknife among all of us. The Chinese could no longer see us and had no idea how close to the Japanese position we were. A Japanese soldier could have easily strolled down and put us out of our misery.
Next morning, the way was clear for an Oklahoma Sooner dash into Liuchow. We got up very early in a drizzling rain and learned that the Japanese had abandoned their position and Chinese scouts were setting out to explore the road. Our decision was made. This had to be it. My photographers, including the Air Force officer and me, hurriedly packed up and moved out. We caught up to and passed the lead element of Chinese scouts. No consultations now. We could see the hill was empty and we did not want to be stalled. The flat surface of the airfield soon appeared in the distance, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Here we followed the wire until we found an opening. The remains of the building installations were on the far side of the enormous field whose dirt runways were pitted with four-foot-wide holes. Glancing down into one of these holes, I thought it looked as if the Japanese had dug them with the intention of putting mines in them and then left without completing the job.
The July 9, 1945, issue of Time magazine featured Teddy White’s report on the recapture of Liuchow, which was now a horrible, terror-stricken shambles. Few buildings remained intact. Fires smoldered and death hung heavy over everything. Very few people were in the streets and those were literally in a daze. A large river bisected the city. All of its bridges had been destroyed. We drove along the Liu River’s edge, photographing the destruction. We found a family huddled in the center of the road. Two little children lay there, apparently near death. Their parents had been shot in the legs. Through a combination of words and gestures, they told us they had been attacked by the Japanese. Unfortunately, we had no medical resources and could not even give them rudimentary treatment. I hoped that we might find someone who could h
elp them, but looking around at the destruction everywhere made me realize there was little possibility of doing so.
We needed to cross the water to get to the main center of town, and a boatman offered to take the four of us in his small sampan. A crowd on the other bank stood waiting for their great American liberators, namely, us photographers. Waving flags, they cheered at the edge of the boat landing. The Chinese slapped us on the backs. Disillusion had yet to set in. That would take a few days.
The first night back on the airfield was uneasy, but nothing happened. In the morning we explored our surroundings. The wrecks of several planes were neatly lined up in a bay adjoining one runway. The Japanese had lived up to their reputed cleverness. They had camouflaged destroyed American fighter planes to look like Japanese Zeros. Their ruse meant to draw fire had worked; these decoys were riddled with bullet holes and torn up by American bombing and strafing.
The next day a captain from the Corps of Engineers and an enlisted man landed in a little L-5. The captain had not been out of the plane for five minutes before he discovered the first land mine. In fact, his plane had passed right over it when it landed. We were dumbfounded. The Japanese had planted American fragmentation bombs with detonators everywhere. We followed the captain and he pointed out the ugly noses of one frag bomb after another. He walked to the edge of one of the holes, but stopped before he got to the lip. A bomb was planted there, too. The Japanese had expected us to do just as we had done, lured by our curiosity into mortal danger. The enemy had purposely left their excavations empty and positioned mines in the loose dirt around their brims.
The captain and his helper set to work clearing off a strip for future landings. They crawled on their stomachs up to the mines and softly brushed away the dirt. Then they attached fuses and lit them one by one to destroy them. We photographed the first few attempts, but retreated when the fuses started sputtering. I jumped into the jeep and drove it more than a hundred yards away. One of the mines sent shrapnel screaming past my ears even at that distance. In the end, it turned out that there were thousands of mines on the field and it took weeks to clear them. I returned by plane to Kunming with the exposed film, remembering I had earlier looked down into one of those holes and feeling grateful I had not set off a mine and been killed.
I was recommended for a Bronze Star. Then the citation was disapproved by Lieutenant General George E. Stratemener. I have no specific idea who I might have annoyed. Does it happen very often that a recommendation is annulled? I do not know, but it was nice to be recommended. I thought what I had done was very reckless. I didn’t know any better, I had acted spontaneously. Nobody told me about mines. What does a photographer have to know about landmines?
5
“The Liberators”: Shanghai and the Return Home
From Liuchow an Air Force plane flew us to Shanghai, a place I already knew through dreams—it was my secret Chicago. I had earned the right to go there after dodging cholera and malaria, after slogging through the mess created by the corrupt and crooked Chiang Kai-shek regime. We landed in a drizzling rain at a Japanese-held field and three of my 164th photographers and I were taken to a Japanese-driven pickup truck parked on a runway. The war was still on but it was with a new script. I had switched consciously from Edgar Snow’s version, Red Star, to Malraux’s Man’s Fate.
Standing in the open back of the truck, the four of us were driven into the city. There was nobody to be seen for blocks. Then we began to notice people in the streets, gawking at us and, as I gradually realized, cheering—we four in American uniforms, standing in the rain, represented again the US liberating army. The truck took us to the Bund, the waterfront area of Shanghai, to the Cathay Hotel—one of the most beautiful hotels I had ever seen. Outside the Cathay, Bubbling Well Road and then Nanking Road were lined with people who applauded as we entered the hotel. The Japanese manager met us in the lobby. I was in a fog, dazed by this strange transition in a war that still had a few days to run. The manager led me to my suite, knocked, and an imposing Japanese officer in an immaculate white uniform answered, bowed to me, and left, turning over his luxurious suite to a twenty-three-year-old American lieutenant.
On the day before, I had slept on an airfield in the cholera-stricken heat bath of Liuchow. Now with the press of a button I was ordering trays of Canadian Club, ice and soda from room service. Out on Bubbling Well Road the girls were walking arm in arm, while American officers were still imprisoned in the YMCA practically next door and would be kept there for at least a few days to come. The latter were delighted when we brought bottles of scotch to their cells. But we were free and they stayed in jail.
We were invited to a party at a Soviet club. It was a dinner in a richly appointed hall with a portrait of Stalin at one end and Lenin at the other. There were many beautiful women in attendance. As the night progressed, I found that most of the Russians there, many of whom were Jewish, didn’t like Stalin or Lenin, for that matter. At the end of the evening, I asked one of the girls if I could take her home. She pointedly told me to watch out for the German Jewesses I might meet in the ghetto. They were all prostitutes, she warned.
I had learned that perhaps 20,000 German and Austrian Jews were still confined to a ghetto, now known as the Shanghai Ghetto, not far from our hotel. The next day we stumbled on some of them at an afternoon dance/ picnic they were holding in Hongkou Park. They stared at us and at our American uniforms as though we were apparitions, and we were equally shocked to see them. Within what seemed a short time a young man came running up to me with a small package that he insisted upon giving to me. It was a Rolleiflex camera still in its original box. I think he must have returned to the ghetto to pick it up. The band stopped playing and we found ourselves joyously embraced by men and women, young and not so young. A short while later we heard a voice call out from the podium, “Break it up, it’s curfew.”
“No more curfew,” I said, “the war is over.” My new friends were not quite convinced.
I picked out one young woman, Ilse Hammer, a very attractive, dark, German Jewish girl from Berlin. We went and sat on a bench together, defying the curfew at dusk. The streetlights lit up, and along came a tall, turbaned Sikh rifleman in the International Settlement Police, a vestige of British Rule that the Japanese had maintained. This was the test. My new friends and we Americans, shaking, watched as the Sikh strolled up. He saluted me and said, “Good evening, Sahib.”
He hadn’t tried to arrest us, he merely wished us a good evening. The constabulary already recognized their new clients.
It soon became apparent that Ilse was also adaptive. A former law student from Berlin, she unlocked Shanghai for me. Despite the curfew maintained in the ghetto, she had made the French Concession her domain, her special place, that chunk of Paris where one drank at turn-of–the-century bistros on the Avenue Joffre.
I was definitely more fascinated by her than disapproving. Ilse made me think of Valerie, the temptress in Malraux’s Man’s Fate, which was set in Shanghai. But who then was I? Sometimes I was her lover and protector. At other times, I was waiting, anxious and excited, for her to return from some unexplained rendezvous.
“Tony” was Ilse’s Shanghai name. She worked at the Roxy, a somewhat disreputable nightclub, as if there could be such a thing in wartime Shanghai, located on Tongshan Road alongside several other little nightclubs. The club was set back from the sidewalk, in a clump of trees. Its small electric sign was scarcely noticeable. A clean paved walk led up to the door, where a turbaned Sikh doorman stood. Inside, a long hallway led to the main part of the club. A bar was partially enclosed in a niche in the far corner of the room. A three-piece band softly played old American tunes almost constantly. A small dance space was carved out from the nest of tables and a few couples were sometimes dancing. It was not crowded.
The night I met her, Tony was sitting at one of the tables waiting for someone like me. I asked her to join me. She led me over to a booth in the quietest part of the room. Her l
ow-heeled shoes and simple beige dress seemed made more for a walk through the park than this dark nightclub. Her hair fell down over her neck in a thick wave, softening her slightly sharp features and giving a touch of tender youthfulness to her big sad eyes. The dark rings under them were not noticeable in the smoky air. I liked Tony, very much.
A voluptuous young blonde sat by herself in a corner. Tony said that she was her girlfriend Trudy. The music stopped and the musicians retired to the bar and Tony’s friend came over to our table. At three in the morning an American marine sergeant entered the club and announced that the closing hour was approaching. For the moment, he constituted the honorary and complete military police force of Shanghai. After spending the war in a Shanghai jail, he had been released to the heaven prepared for all good Marines. Nobody took his warning very seriously and he downed two shots of rum before shaking hands all around and leaving.
Tony and Trudy began talking about themselves. They were Jewish refugees from Berlin. Shanghai was the only port left open to them when they fled Germany before the outbreak of the war. Tony was not so eager to talk about the past. She had just entered law school in Berlin when the professors began their diatribes against the Jews. She had tried to ignore the problem, but it began to be impossible. One day she insulted a teacher. Her friends, including the head of the school, smoothed things over while she packed her books and left. After that the problem was how to leave the country. Her mother was not willing to go: Germany was her homeland, and she owned property there. Tony’s father, separated from the family for years, wrote from Switzerland, constantly urging her to leave. There was a friend, the son of a rich shop owner. They decided to get married and escape together. Hans was still a boy, but it was easier for a married woman to travel. They took a train to Italy, and at the German frontier they were searched—and robbed—by the German frontier guards. It was a battle to get on a boat, any boat. However, their honeymoon voyage was provided, free of charge, on a luxury-style Japanese ship that took them to Shanghai, the only port they knew in the world still open to them, from an Italian port on the Mediterranean. The Italians and especially the Japanese operators of the luxurious tour ship were friendly and cooperative.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 6
