by Tim Newark
William Ewart Fairbairn was one of fourteen children, born in Mill End in Hertfordshire in 1885 to a bootmaker. His first two names were taken from those of Gladstone – the opium trade battling, and then defending, prime minister. Fairbairn served six years with the Royal Marines and joined the SMP in 1907 as a constable. Specialising in arms training and unarmed combat, he soon gained a reputation for instructing his policemen in the realities of street fighting. He devised his own blend of Japanese and Chinese martial arts that he called Defendu and published a manual for it in Shanghai in 1915:
One of the essential principles of this science is to meet an attack quickly and by another form of counter attack; the suddenness of this will, in many cases, so bewilder your opponent that it will be possible to apply a hold from which he will find it impossible to extricate himself. In many cases an opponent’s greater strength may be turned to his disadvantage.
Fairbairn also focused his attention on perfecting police gunmanship. The traditional stance of standing side-on to a target with the arm outstretched, pointing the gun to aim, was no good for sudden, chaotic gunfights on Shanghai streets. ‘In the great majority of shooting affrays the distance at which firing takes place is not more than four yards,’ said Fairbairn. ‘If you have to fire, your instinct will be to do so as quickly as possible, and you will probably do it with a bent arm, possibly even from the level of the hip.’ It was the police officer’s first-hand experience of combat that made him such a good teacher:
It may be that a bullet whizzes past you and that you will experience the momentary stupefaction which is due to the shock of the explosion at very short range of the shot just fired by your opponent – a very different feeling, we can assure you, from that experienced when you are standing behind or alongside a pistol that is being fired.
The proof of the effectiveness of his innovative gun training – shooting quickly from the hip at the assailant’s torso – was demonstrated in figures that showed that out of hundreds of armed encounters over a decade of police service in the SMP, only 42 police officers were killed, as against 260 criminals shot dead.
The sort of close-quarter fighting experienced by Fairbairn and his men was exemplified by one incident in which they cornered a notorious kidnapper in 1928. The kidnapping of wealthy people by criminal gangs had reached epidemic proportions in Shanghai. When news came through of one victim being held in a two-storey house on the outskirts of the city on Chusan Road, Superintendent Fairbairn led his team to the rescue.
Issued with bulletproof vests and shields, armed to the teeth with guns and grenades, this was no ordinary police unit. It was a team of experts called the Special Reserve Unit (SRU). Relieved of having to take care of day-to-day routine duties, they were highly trained in dealing with unusual situations. Yet again, this was Fairbairn’s innovation and he intended them to be an elite unit.
‘They had to be self contained,’ he said, ‘and prepared to maintain themselves on the scene of trouble for 48 hours without relief from any other Branch of the Force.’ Made up of volunteers consisting of Europeans, Sikhs and Chinese, they travelled to trouble spots in specially designed trucks called ‘Black Marias’.
On arriving at the kidnapper’s house, the SRU set about its business with relentless efficiency. A cordon was put in place, covering the back and front of the house, with snipers aiming at the roof. An armoured raiding party got ready to storm the building. Led by a plain-clothes Chinese detective who was pretending to be a gang member, they forced open the front door and handcuffed one of the kidnapping gang. Advancing cautiously up the stairs behind their shields, they were met with gunfire. As the SRU returned a hail of bullets, one of the gang members ran to the balcony on the first floor, but was hit by a sniper outside. In the confusion, another gang member was shot in the stomach in the method devised by Fairbairn for close-quarter shooting.
Breaking into the room holding the kidnap victim, the police found a terrified hostage with his feet tied, holding a blanket in front of his face. But the chief kidnapper had gone. He had been seen to jump from the roof of the house to a neighbouring roof – across a gap of 12 feet – while being shot at by one of the snipers. Clearly, this was an extraordinary outlaw.
When word came back from a wounded gang member that this man was in fact Yang Siau May, there was a stunned silence among the SRU. Known as the ‘Old Small Cat’, Yang was chief of the most prolific kidnap gang in Shanghai, with more than 150 criminals under his direct command. Dealing with this highly dangerous man would demand all the special policing skills Fairbairn had devised.
With night falling, Fairbairn ordered floodlights to illuminate the house hiding Yang. The cordon was tightened, with snipers targeting any escape routes from the roof of the building. The SRU would have to storm the house, but before doing so they lobbed in tear gas. Unfortunately, all this activity had attracted journalists and hundreds of sightseers, and some of the SRU were distracted by having to control the crowd. The owner of the building, bathing in the sudden attention of the local media, said that the police should do all they could to apprehend the chief villain, even if meant burning it down.
Wearing gas masks, a storming party edged into the building, clearing it room by room. As they advanced slowly up the stairs, an officer was shot in the arm by Yang. Crouching down, the police fired back into the fume-filled void. Yang retreated to an attic on the second floor. Fairbairn got plans of the building brought to him from the Public Works Department and saw the attic had two exit windows. Both were floodlit and covered by snipers with telescopic scopes on their rifles.
Holding a megaphone, Fairbairn told Yang that he was cornered with no possibility of escape and that he should throw out his pistol and stand at the window with his hands up. No reply came back from the building. The police hurled in more tear gas. Still no response. They tried to rush the stairs up to the attic, but the first policeman had his hat shot off and they scrambled back down again. It wasn’t worth the risk and Fairbairn ordered his unit to use hand grenades to force him out or kill him. When one bounced into the attic, Yang picked it up and threw it back, making the police beat a hasty retreat.
Next, a group of SRU in gas masks and body armour pushed a ladder up against the building, leaning it against the attic window. Throwing in three grenades in quick succession, they sprinted up the ladder and, seeing Yang crouching in a corner, opened fire, catching him with a bullet in the thigh. Not cowed, Yang leapt up and ran at the policemen, shooting one in the face – miraculously, the bullet only grazed the police officer’s eyebrow. Tumbling backwards, the assault unit had to think again.
As the siege dragged on into the early morning, Fairbairn ordered a platform to be erected opposite the attic window. When one policeman spotted the wounded Yang, he shot at him. Again this only encouraged the gangster to drag himself towards the window to fire his final shots. At that point, the police raked the building around him with machine-gun bullets and one caught Yang in the spine, finally killing him. It had been an epic shoot-out. Demonstrating the many talents of Fairbairn’s Special Reserve Unit, it had, however, showed the die-hard calibre of gangsters they faced in ever more dangerous situations.
Yang may have been king of the kidnappers in Shanghai, but he was a minor player compared to the suit-wearing top mobsters that ran the city’s underworld. Unlike other colonial police forces, that took bribes and looked the other way, the SMP made it their business to investigate the upper echelons of organised crime – but they also got help from intelligence agencies within the British administration. For, as the riproaring 1920s turned into the war-torn 1930s, the pure moneymaking of local gangsters was replaced by a need for survival that meant top criminals had to align themselves with political parties.
The clash of the warlords following the demise of the Qing Dynasty had been brought to an end by the triumph of the Kuomintang nationalists in 1928, led by Chiang Kai-shek. But the fighting was far from over, as the nationalists had deadly rivals i
n the Chinese Communist Party. At first, the communists enjoyed support in the major city centres, but the nationalists ruthlessly broke their influence and forced them into the countryside. This struggle for power was mirrored in the shifting allegiances of the two leading criminal gangs in Shanghai – the Greens and the Reds. They were secret brotherhood societies, identical to the Triads recognised by British colonial governors in South-East Asian Chinese communities.
‘Particularly worthy of note is the fact that these societies have been founded in Southern Provinces of China,’ said a British Intelligence officer, ‘by a people of much the same temperament as the Sicilians – the founders of the notorious Mafia.’
The Green Gang – Ching Pang – was said to have originated from traditional boatmen who lost their jobs when steamships took over their trade. The Red Gang – Hung Pang – had the core of its supporters in Canton, with affiliated groups around the country. In 1911, both these secret societies had thrown their weight and influence behind the Chinese nationalists and helped Chiang Kai-shek sweep into power.
When Chiang needed to purge Shanghai of communists, the Green Gang helped him. On 12 April 1927, more than 300 left-wingers were eliminated in the city. The gangster militia, wearing white armbands over denim overalls, bearing the title ‘worker’, launched an early morning raid on union branches. Left-wingers were hunted down and shot or beheaded in the streets. Some were said to have been thrown alive into the furnaces of locomotives.
‘It is generally believed that in exchange for assistance rendered to him,’ said a British Intelligence report, ‘General Chiang promised the Green Party in Shanghai a monopoly of the opium business, and it was not long before the party enjoyed the reputation of a gang of racketeers whose activities were on a par with those of their Chicago counterparts – the Capone gang. Nothing of importance happened in Shanghai in which could not be found the influence of the Green Party, workers organisations and labour unions being completely under its domination.’
For part of the 1920s, before Chiang’s purge, the Green Gang had used communists to organise strikes as part of their labour racket. In May 1925, a protest involving Chinese students was broken up by the SMP, with the death of ten students. It resulted in increased tension between the local Chinese and police and was the catalyst for Fairbairn establishing his Special Reserve Unit. Among the young agitators accused of being involved was a 31-year-old communist called Mao Tse-tung, who fled to Canton before he could be arrested.
The Green Gang had had a firm hold on the drugs trade in Shanghai before Chiang ‘rewarded’ them in 1927. They controlled most of the opium dens and even invented their own drugs, creating pills by mixing heroin with strychnine. When an international ban on the trafficking of heroin reduced the amount flowing into China, they imported more raw opium and manufactured heroin in their own factories, some of which occasionally blew up.
The most dominant figure in the Green Gang was Du Yue-sheng. Born into poverty, with the nickname ‘Big Ears’, this thin, decadent figure began his criminal career as a bodyguard for a brothel. He then endeared himself to the wife of a leading gangster, who also doubled as a detective in the French Concession Police Force. Under her patronage, he rapidly rose up the ranks of the Green Gang, so that when her husband was arrested, Du stepped into his shoes.
Du acquired a four-storey European-style mansion in the French Concession, which became the headquarters of his criminal empire, embracing brothels, opium dens, gunrunning, gold smuggling and protection rackets. It was Du who threw in his lot with Chiang Kai-shek, directing the gangster militia for the anti-communist Shanghai purge. In return for his political services, Du was awarded the ‘Order of the Brilliant Jade’ and appointed to the board of the Opium Suppression Bureau in the nationalist-controlled city.
Addicted to the drugs he had dealt in from an early age, Du sometimes seemed wrapped in an opium cloud of pleasure, as he enjoyed the company of his two 15-year-old concubines. But an invitation to his mansion could be a very deadly assignation. On one occasion, Du heard a terrible commotion in his house and shuffled to the top of the stairs. Below, he saw one of his gangsters strangling a stubborn union leader. ‘Not here!’ he shouted. ‘Not in my house!’ The mobster quickly bundled the body of the union leader into a sack and drove him to a waste ground to dump him. When the half-dead victim struggled inside his sack, the mobster kicked him into a hastily dug grave and buried him alive.
Sometimes, Du used his dinner table as a place of execution. Three French Concession officials who had failed to please him were treated to a grand feast that featured rare mushrooms. Shortly afterwards, all three died from food poisoning. When a French journalist dared to write up the story of Du’s domination of the corrupt French Concession, he wisely took a quick ship home, but even then Du’s vengeance caught up with him. The vessel was set on fire and sank in the Indian Ocean, drowning everyone, including the reporter.
Two celebrated young English writers, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, met Du in Shanghai and recorded their own impression of him.
To visit Du’s flat was to enter a strongly guarded fortress. At least a dozen attendants were posted in the hall, and, when we sat down to talk, there were others who stood in the background behind our chairs. Du himself was tall and thin, with a face that seemed hewn out of stone, a Chinese version of the Sphinx. Peculiarly and inexplicably terrifying were his feet, in their silk socks and smart pointed European boots, emerging from beneath the long silken gown. Perhaps the Sphinx, too, would be even more frightening if it wore a modern top hat.
Du’s tentacles spread into the legitimate business world and a ‘Who’s Who’ in Shanghai listed him as president of several major banks and hospitals, as well as being a councillor on the French Municipal Council. He had the head of the police in the French Concession on his payroll to the extent that policemen guarded his mansion. He frequently used the corrupt law enforcers to crack down on his criminal rivals. For his personal bodyguard, he chose White Russians.
When Du tried to extend his influence to the British Shanghai Municipal Police, he was surprised to be turned down. The mobster chief alerted the police force that a consignment of his opium was coming into port and they should steer well clear of it. One brave officer refused to be his lackey. Instead, the Chinese superintendent captured the drugs haul, costing Du thousands of dollars. A little later, the same Chinese officer was shot dead outside his home.
The Red Gang did not have the same influence in Shanghai as the Greens, being a junior member of the larger Cantonese organisation. They were small-time drug dealers, but their separation from the political establishment meant they could occasionally threaten the status quo. In order to balance the influence of the Greens, Chiang Kai-shek established his own gang of supporters called the Blue Shirt Society. Chinese fascists numbering some 3,000, they were placed in various political posts.
In the 1930s, the sinister alliance between Chinese generals, politicians and gangsters was threatened by an even more malevolent crime machine – the encroaching Japanese. Having grabbed German colonies in China during the First World War, the Japanese proceeded to dominate the north of the country. In 1931, they occupied Manchuria and established a puppet state called Manchukuo. To help them plunder wealth from their new possessions, the leading Japanese generals and politicians had their own paramilitary forces recruited from Japan’s masters of organised crime, the Yakuza.
Initially, distracted by his fight against the communists, Chiang Kai-shek did little to resist the Japanese advance, but in 1936 the nationalists and communists came together to form a united front against their common enemy. Shortly afterwards, the Japanese embarked on a full-blown invasion of the rest of China. Their wellequipped modern armies swiftly overwhelmed Chinese resistance and captured most of the northern and central regions of the country by 1938, including Shanghai. Japanese rule was ruthless and barbaric, with millions of Chinese civilians slaughtered, raped and mutilated and their pr
operty looted.
While the nationalists retreated to the impregnable mountains of Szechuan, the communists were left to fight a guerrilla war against their occupiers. As for the British in the International Settlement, it was a terrible wake-up call to the threat posed by the Japanese to the rest of Asia – and the Shanghai Municipal Police were on the front line.
8
THE MUTILATED INSPECTOR HUTTON
TENSIONS BETWEEN THE JAPANESE AND the Shanghai Municipal Police were already showing in late 1937. On Christmas Day, an inspector was driving a police car when he happened to obstruct a Japanese dispatch rider. A few days later, he was asked to explain his action at Japanese naval headquarters. During the course of the interview, he was struck by a Japanese officer and detained. When a superintendent later called to secure his release, he was also ill-treated by the Japanese. This was bad enough, but what quickly followed was a more serious incident.
On 6 January 1938, Probationary Police Sergeant Turner was on duty at the east barrier on Brenan Road when he objected to the rough treatment being handed out by Japanese sentries to a Chinese civilian. He ordered one of the Japanese police constables at the barrier to reprimand them, but the Japanese PC refused, so Turner said he would report his poor attitude. The Japanese PC then told the soldiers that the Englishman had insulted them. The Japanese soldiers proceeded to assault Turner, beating him so badly that he needed hospital treatment.
When two more Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) officers turned up, they were threatened with loaded rifles and bayonets. It was only thanks to the intervention of a Japanese sub-inspector of the SMP that the situation did not escalate further.
