by Tim Newark
‘I feel sure that you and the responsible military and naval authorities will agree with me that it is most deplorable that members of the Japanese armed forces should be permitted to act in this lawless manner,’ wrote a British member of the Shanghai Municipal Council to the Japanese Consul-General. ‘And I have the honour to request accordingly that you will endeavour to arrange that a strict enquiry be held into these cases and those found guilty suitably disciplined in order to prevent further disorders.’
It is unlikely that the councillor even received an answer to this demand. So little did the Japanese care, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, felt compelled to take a personal interest in the case and instructed His Majesty’s Ambassador to Tokyo to demand satisfaction for these assaults in the strongest possible terms – ‘stronger than we have used in almost any other incident in the present hostilities’. No such satisfaction having been received, His Majesty’s Government was left with the conviction that the Japanese government was utterly careless of the rights and feelings of British subjects.
To pursue these incidents further seemed a fruitless task and some British diplomats suggested dropping their insistence on redress. The Consul-General in Shanghai disagreed.
‘I think that that would be a mistake,’ he said, ‘and that quiet acceptance of rebuffs in the hope of not irritating the Japanese is also mistaken. Even if we are not in a position to exact apologies we can express our resentment in forcible terms and leave the Japanese Government with an uneasy feeling that these unsettled incidents are being added to the bill, which perhaps they may some day have to meet.’
Sadly, there would be many more, far worse incidents added to that bill before it was settled in world war.
Fighting between Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalists and the Japanese had already broken out on the streets of Shanghai outside the International Settlement in the summer of 1937. Thousands of Chinese refugees flooded into the European concessions, while Britons stood on the roofs of buildings watching the plumes of smoke rise around them. The fact that the British wanted to keep conditions as normal as possible is reflected in their concerns about assaults on their policemen.
While the Chinese were being slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands elsewhere in the country, the British knew it was important to keep up their stern appearance. It was all a matter of maintaining respect for the empire and, in some ways, the Japanese appreciated this. They knew that the International Settlement was a moneymaking machine and they wanted very much for that to continue under their control. The same applied to Japanese gangsters busily taking over the illicit drugs trade. They liked stability. On the one hand, their political masters spoke out against opium smoking, while on the other, Japanese traffickers were rushed off their feet fulfilling the enormous demand.
‘Japan’s record in the opium and narcotics traffic is not one to be proud of,’ said the British Consul-General at Mukden, capital of the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo. In the north-east of China, there was a large clandestine trade, occasionally exposed by the discovery of heroin factories or the arrest of careless smugglers. ‘Recently a Japanese travelling from Tientsin to Mukden with an ordinary funeral urn aroused the suspicion of the police, who insisted on opening the urn and found, not cremated ashes, but morphine. It is impossible to guess how many urns have previously served this purpose.’
Russell Pasha, the great international drugs-buster, believed there was a more sinister purpose behind the Japanese control of opium and its derivatives.
‘Japanese-occupied China soon became,’ he declared, ‘the only country of the world where the increase of drug addiction was a studied government policy. Year after year at Geneva we had to listen to the specious talk of the Japanese delegate: year after year the American delegation and the Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau gave chapter and verse, showing the state of things in Manchukuo and China north of the wall, but to no effect. Japan had decided upon heroin addiction as a weapon of aggression and deliberately converted the territories she conquered from China into one huge opium farm and heroin den.’
Japanese criminals and their military masters were deliberately subduing the Chinese population by getting them hooked on illicit drugs. It ensured their occupation could run more smoothly and generated vast profits for the gangsters and generals involved. The blatant use of narcotics to enslave the Chinese was observed by Miner Searle Bates, the American-born professor of history at Nanking University:
The situation through the occupied areas was one of the open sale of opium in government shops or licensed shops, and the aggressive peddling of heroin. In some cases, there was attractive advertising of opium; in some cases, Japanese soldiers used opium as payment for prostitutes and for labour engaged on military supply dumps.
Bates estimated the Japanese army was making at least $3 million every month out of the sale of opium to Nanking’s 50,000 addicts. When he visited Tokyo in 1939, he asked a senior military figure whether he thought the opium plague might be brought under control.
‘No, the general told me that so long as the war continues, there is no hope of anything better because no other source of revenue has been found for the puppet government.’
Chinese peasants were compelled to grow opium and then had to sell it to the Japanese army at a price below the market value. Despite taking over thousands of acres of land for poppy cultivation, the Japanese could still not meet the demand from their millions of new Chinese addicts and had to import opium from abroad, especially from Persia. Venerable Japanese firms Mitsubishi and Mitsui were the principal importers and distributors of narcotics in the Japanese-occupied territories. The Imperial Japanese Navy escorted the narcotics shipments through foreign seas.
An American consul in Manchukuo described the fate of some of the Chinese addicts he saw:
There lay on an ash heap just behind the narcotic brothels seven naked corpses which had evidently been stripped of their rags by fellow addicts. It is generally stated that this is a daily sight … There was offered no other explanation than that these dead met their end through narcotic poisoning.
‘One thing, which is quite certain,’ added Russell Pasha, ‘is that she [Japan] allowed no competition in the trade from the Drugs Barons of Europe.’ Their days were over – their imperial networks disrupted. The approaching world war would allow local Japanese and Chinese regimes in Asia to get a grip on the trade and they would not let go. It would complete the shift from western to eastern control of the narcotics underworld.
* * *
As for the British in China, their attempt to maintain a dignified distance from the hellish events around them slowly but surely crumbled, as the invading Japanese moved beyond traditional areas of looting and organised crime to steal their way into other areas of business – such as eggs.
In October 1939, the British Board of Trade received an irate letter from the British Egg Packing and Cold Storage Company in Shanghai. For the previous two years, despite the conflict and the increasing interference of the Japanese, the firm had managed to continue its trade in eggs from China to Britain. But recently the situation had deteriorated.
‘The spring of 1939 saw an intensified campaign from a Japanese concern – the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha,’ explained the company owner, ‘which saw fit under the then prevailing conditions, to establish an egg plant of their own and enter the market, not on a free or competitive basis, but under the protection of their Military and Naval Authorities, and the Chinese representing us in the interior as well as locally were intimidated by them, thus obstructing free purchases and conveyance of our eggs.’
The company managed to obtain enough eggs through other means to fulfil their obligations, but later in the year the company owner visited China to see for himself what was going on and was shocked by the outright theft of his produce.
‘On 15 October 1939 our upcountry branch office sent us 41 baskets of eggs, roughly 40,000 eggs, the Bills of Lading were in o
ur name and the cargo was paid for by my firm and even Customs duty was paid. When the steamer docked in Shanghai, Mitsui Bussan officials simply helped themselves to the cargo.’
On another occasion, vans containing hundreds of thousands of eggs were hijacked by the Japanese and redirected to their own cold storage units.
‘I feel that the wrong done is unprecedented in the annals of British commerce,’ said the egg company owner. ‘I feel sure that you are in a position to help us considerably in this respect.’
If only they could have. It was no small matter – the China Press headlined it as a major crime against British and American egg traders. The industry was the third-largest export business in China and the newspaper reported that no fewer than 500,000 eggs had been stolen by Japanese ‘ostensibly acting under instructions from the Japanese military headquarters’.
When the British authorities investigated, they were told, a year later, that the Japanese military had cancelled all permits issued to foreign egg buyers and would ‘now only permit exports of egg produce by military transports to Japan’.
It was merely the tip of an iceberg in which the Japanese military transformed itself into a giant criminal operation.
By late 1938, the Japanese had appointed Chinese collaborators to their Special Municipal Government, which became their instrument for ruling the city of Shanghai. They also ran their own police force in parallel with the Shanghai Municipal Police. The potential for clashes was deliberate.
‘Armed crime has grown to alarming proportions,’ reported the author of the ‘Shanghai Despatch’, ‘and the division of authority between two police forces both claiming sole jurisdiction has inevitably led to incidents. It became evident moreover that these incidents were not the result of mere accident or misunderstanding but were deliberately provoked by the Special Municipality Police and the other armed organisations operating under Japanese auspices.’
In October 1939, a Chinese constable of the SMP was killed and a Sikh constable wounded on traffic duty by gunmen in plain clothes. Later that month, a more serious 30-minute gun battle broke out early one morning when SMP officers stopped a suspicious-looking motorcycle with no lights or licence. They were then fired on by Chinese aligned to the Japanese regime, shooting from the heavily fortified headquarters of a Kuomintang nationalist association. A Chinese constable was killed during the confrontation.
The fact that Japanese-controlled newspapers made a big matter out of this incident, telling the SMP to withdraw from the International Settlement, revealed how far top Chinese criminals had come to an accommodation with the Japanese. Du Yue-sheng, too closely associated with Chiang Kai-shek, had fled to Hong Kong and then on to Chungking, wartime capital of nationalist China. But those senior members of the Green Gang that stayed behind no doubt came to an agreement with the Japanese occupiers, acting as their eyes and ears on the street, as well as making sure the Japanese rulers got their slice of any illicit action.
The Red Gang, not having grabbed such a large slice of the Shanghai underworld as the Greens, were less at home with the Japanese and subsequently backed acts of defiance, including murdering Japanese officials who got too close to their activities. Out in the countryside, it was difficult to tell whether it was an organised resistance or gangsters who were leading the fight against Japanese occupation. The British Consulate-General in Harbin reported an incident to the British in Shanghai in November 1939, when 1,000 bandits rode into the town of Noho.
‘The small Japanese garrison was unable to evict the invaders and many Japanese civilians were hunted down and shot in the streets. The Chinese population was not molested and merchants in the town were assured that nothing was required of them. The exclusively anti-Japanese character of this successful raid caused a panic among the Japanese population.’
This was sheer revenge for the ravages of the Japanese army and was led by Chinese who could be characterised either as bandits or partisans but were really a mixture of both. It was a movement that would grow throughout South-East Asia, as native populations vented their anger on the Japanese invaders.
The true nature of some people’s allegiances was hard to fathom. Vladimir Michailovich Kedrolivansky came to Shanghai in 1938 as an employee of the US Treasury Department – that is, he was an agent for Harry J. Anslinger’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Tasked with finding out more about the drugs trade and how it affected the USA, he operated undercover, but the Russian seemed more interested in forging connections between murky elements of fellow émigrés in Shanghai and the Japanese authorities.
The British SIS – Secret Intelligence Service – began to take an interest in Kedrolivansky and noted his close friendship with a female Russian agent, also an employee of the US Treasury Department, who worked in Hong Kong. The SIS concluded that although they might be funded by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, they ‘appeared to be concerned primarily with White Russian crookery and the Japanese’.
In this part of the world, Harry J. Anslinger was a little out of his depth and once news of this was returned to Washington, the US Treasury Department offered to remove Kedrolivansky from the Far East, as they realised he was an embarrassment to the British – and themselves. ‘We availed ourselves of their kind offer,’ said a British official.
As the 1940s unfolded, with war in Europe already a reality, a bubble mentality evolved in Shanghai as the Europeans witnessed the events around them, wondering how long it would be before they were drawn into the awful drama. A British Shanghai Intelligence report captured the increasingly desperate mood in the city:
The rise in the cost of living is not unnaturally reflected in a serious rise in crime, especially armed robberies. A phenomenon which contrasts oddly with the poverty generally prevailing is, however, the flourishing existence of large numbers of gambling dens, at which millions of dollars are said to be spent nightly, a large percentage of which must undoubtedly percolate into the pockets of the local Japanese and puppet authorities.
Several high-profile murders occurred across the city, seemingly related to events elsewhere in the world. A well-known French lawyer was shot dead on the steps of his office. At first, he was thought to be the victim of a clash between Vichy French and supporters of General de Gaulle, but it later emerged that he had fallen out with a criminal faction in the French Concession. In June 1941, the Japanese Special Deputy Commissioner of Shanghai Police was murdered in a surprisingly brazen act.
‘Various motives suggested for the crime were vengeance on the part of Western District gambling-den racketeers,’ said a secret British report, ‘for the part played by him in suppressing their haunts; and vengeance of his own Japanese subordinates in the police for the strong line taken by him against their undisciplined habits. In any case it is clear that Mr Akagi was a moderate and as such liable to incur the resentment of extremist elements.’
He seemed to be a rare example of a Japanese authority figure wanting to introduce some justice back into the city. He didn’t last long. As the situation seemed unlikely to get any better, several British officers in the SMP got out while they could. Many of them wanted to help out their motherland, as it stood alone against Nazi Germany. One of these men was the deadly efficient Assistant Commissioner William Fairbairn. He got out in 1940 and immediately offered his considerable weapon-training skills to British covert forces.
With another ex-SMP colleague, Eric A. Sykes, the 55-year-old Fairbairn trained Commandos and US Rangers in close-quarter combat techniques. Together, they devised the Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife, used by British Special Forces throughout the Second World War. A double-edged slender dagger, it was designed to easily penetrate the ribcage and cause maximum damage. ‘It is essential that the blade have a sharp stabbing point and good cutting edges,’ explained Fairbairn, ‘because an artery torn through (as against a clean cut) tends to contract and stop bleeding. If a main artery is cleanly severed, the wounded man will quickly lose consciousness and die.’ A golden versi
on of this knife is now part of the Commando memorial at Westminster Abbey in London.
A number of the SMP stayed on, despite the deteriorating situation. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the Japanese blitzkrieg across South-East Asia, overwhelming the armies of colonial rulers, their position became more precarious. They were enemy aliens and completely at the mercy of their Japanese governors. British businessmen and administrators in Shanghai were rounded up and tortured under suspicion of being spies. When Japanese policemen or soldiers were attacked by Chinese partisans, the SMP were suspected of being soft on them and letting them escape.
Chief Inspector William Hutton had been in the SMP since 1924. Born in Perthshire, he ended up marrying one of the many Russian women that thronged the city. He stayed on in Shanghai after Britain and Japan went to war and, along with his colleagues, was interned in November 1942. They were held in the former US Marine barracks on Haiphong Road, which had been turned into a concentration camp.
While there, Hutton was accused, along with another policeman, by a collaborating Sikh guard of trying to smuggle a message out of the camp in a hollow pencil. It appears he may have had nothing to do with the offence, but merely stood by his pal. Both men were hauled off to the headquarters of the Kempeitai – the notorious Japanese military police – and were interrogated for four days. The friend readily admitted his guilt and was released, battered but relatively uninjured. Hutton took a more stubbornly resistant stance and was relentlessly beaten.
When he returned to the camp, a cellmate described his injuries:
Nose mashed, teeth broken out, most finger joints broken. Testicles and penis smashed. Cut into the inside of his right leg were two words, WAR and HURT. Cut into the inside of his left thigh were four letters, ANNA.
Anna was Hutton’s beloved Russian wife. Another witness said the word KILLED was also inscribed into the police officer’s flesh, along with an incomplete MURD – all defined clearly by dried blood. The mutilations were not part of his torture; they appear to have been cut by himself into his skin as a way of turning his body into a final testament to what had happened to him.
