George Ferguson reported for duty aboard the USS Guam in the very month that war broke out in Europe. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and two days later France and Britain declared war on Germany. By the end of September, the USSR had marched into Poland, Warsaw had fallen, and the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Demarcation had been signed.
The Guam was then one of five American gunboats that comprised the Yangtze Patrol and that navigated the ever-shifting waters of the “Long River,” as the Chinese called it, from its mouth to Ipin, after which it was known as the “River of Golden Sand.” The Yangtze Patrol represented the longest military operation in U.S. history, having been formed in 1854 shortly after Commodore Perry used the threat of force to open up Japan to trade. Vice Admiral William Glassford took over its command in May 1939.
The objective of the Yangtze Patrol (YangPat, for short) was simple: to ensure the safe passage of American merchant traffic and shield it from the growing menace of Chinese Communist bandits. The Guam was the smallest of the Yangtze gunboats, measuring only 159½ feet. She was a two-screw vessel with a shallow six-foot four-inch draft. Her size gave her an advantage over her sister ships on the Yangtze, where seasonal water levels could vary by as much as fifty to one hundred feet. Unlike the Luzon, Mindanao, Oahu, and Tutuila, the Guam could comfortably chug up to Chungking and make it as far as Pingshan during the summer, nearly 1,600 miles from the sea. She operated by coal-generated steam. Captain A. E. Harris was skipper, and under his command were four line officers, fifty-three sailors, and one doctor—George Ferguson.
By late November 1939 the Guam was toiling up the Yangtze, past Chinkiang, then Nanking, and on to Wuhu. She looked more like a Mississippi riverboat than a U.S. Navy warship; she even had her own bar. But her bridge was fortified, four armor-plated machine guns were mounted on the second deck, and two 3-inch guns were positioned aft and forward, beneath which was George’s cabin. It was a small room, with a narrow mattress atop a chest of drawers, a bookshelf at its head, and a wooden dresser at a tight right angle. On top sat a squat steel safe with the ship’s accounts in it, and George’s Hermes typewriter. Shanghai may have disappeared in the distance, but Lucy was never far from his thoughts. If George posted a letter by 9 A.M., Lucy would have it the following day. Mail from the States took a good month and a half, by contrast. George would be upriver for three months at a time before he returned to Shanghai—and Lucy.
There was never enough time. Even when the Guam was back in Shanghai, George had to maintain his medical responsibilities. He’d leave their suite in the Cathay Mansions early in the morning, hail a cab down to the dock, and row out to the Guam in a gig, and if he had to remain on call through the evening, Lucy would join him in the ship’s dining room. If not, they’d dine together at the Cathay Mansions or go out for dinner, a show, and a nightcap. George still had to be back on board by 8 A.M. the next morning.
Duty upriver was hardly strenuous. There were few medical cases for George except the monthly syphilis inspections, so he was assigned to Ship Service and then the Navy Club, checking inventories and auditing accounts. He quickly made friends with Ensign James O’Rourke, the Commissary Officer on the Guam. George and Jim fraternized like backyard buddies, popping in and out of each other’s cabins without warning, swapping stories about Lucy and Betty—Jim’s intended—and even writing to the other’s girl and exaggerating their misdeeds.
If it weren’t for the hundreds of patients George saw at Wuhu General Hospital, his professional life would have been “pretty dull,” he admitted. In Wuhu he honed his skills performing gallbladder surgery, amputations, and enucleations and removing cysts and tumors. He even delivered his first Chinese baby. In some ways it was perfect practice for a young physician. He completed his rounds by noon, and then the day’s recreations began.
After the fall of Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek moved upriver, and Hankow became the provisional capital of “Free China,” 600 miles from Shanghai. Then, in light of the advancing Japanese Army, the Chinese abandoned Hankow and in October 1938 retreated even farther up the Yangtze to Chungking, 1,300 miles from the sea.
The Japanese installed a puppet government in Hankow, which temporized—even socialized—with the American and European colony there. Six hundred miles west of Shanghai at the junction of the Yangtze and Han Rivers, Hankow was an ancient Chinese city that Marco Polo had praised in his Travels. Dotted with pagodas and marble tombs, it was a major exporter of black leaf tea to Odessa as well as a center of Catholic and Protestant missionary activity. Like Shanghai, it was divided into foreign concessions, and the foreigners liked to play hard. Just outside the Standard Oil compound was a rifle range, a drill ground, and a baseball diamond. Hankow even had its own golf course—built on top of an old Chinese cemetery. “This was Kipling’s east of Suez,” said Lieutenant Kemp Tolley of the YangPat’s Tutuila, “with a bang.”
In Hankow, George enjoyed horseback riding three times a week, the links at the Hankow Race Club, drinks at Rosie’s Tea Room—the only joint with air conditioning—and dinner at Jimmy’s, followed by dancing at the International Club. There were tea parties, cocktail parties, bachelor parties, dinner parties, pool parties aboard the Guam, and movies on the pontoon boat that accompanied it, like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with Shirley Temple, which was “pretty good,” George admitted to Lucy, “but all the pretty girls remind me of you, doggone it.”
Nocturnal adventures frequently led down Dump Street, where Russian cabarets and bars sparkled with White Russian girls. The entertainment was extravagant, exhilarating, and exhausting. All the ship’s officers had their own rickshaw boys to transport them about town; a few had light motorcycles; and by the time they negotiated the 150-foot catwalks that stretched out to the pontoon boat beside the Guam, the sun might be just a few hours from rising. Then on Sunday, with hardly enough time to recover from a hangover, the ritual started all over again.
Sometimes the Guam seemed more like a pleasure boat than a gunboat, a comic blend of nineteenth-century English naval tradition and twentieth-century taste, say, Gilbert and Sullivan on the rocks. You could drink yourself into oblivion, but you had to wear a uniform with a high collar, a tie, regulation khaki shorts, and stockings in the sweltering heat. You could listen to Toscanini, bowl, even go duck hunting from the ship’s deck, but you had to observe military protocol and forms of address.
George was a curious combination “of rascality and sobriety,” Jim reported to Lucy. He socialized with women but kept a gentlemanly distance, was amused and aghast at the alcoholic consumption around him. “I’ve never seen so much drinking before,” George admitted to Lucy. “They get up at ten A.M. Sunday to get their Mint Julep Club going and by noon they’re all stewed. Three months in this place can easily make a wreck of you if you’d let it. I can hardly wait to get back to your love and kisses.” Captain Harris was in his cups so often that George worried he’d develop “the shakes.” George protested too much. He drank, too, but he did so in moderation, and on those occasions when he overimbibed, he confessed to Lucy the next morning with the abashed air of a guilty choirboy.
They drank because that was the old navy culture, culture turned into habit, and because of a slow-burning realization that the world around them was being realigned in ways that would soon turn their days in China into the memory of a glorious summer. The chessboard of humanity was being divided into Allied and Axis powers. The United States passed a revised Neutrality Act on November 4, 1939, but the Japanese could make their move on Shanghai, Hankow, or Chungking anytime.
Lucy, meanwhile, was hardly languishing on the vine in Shanghai. By December she had taken a job at the Shanghai American School and maintained a busy social calendar. Every time one of the YangPat gunboats came into port, there would be ship’s parties, elegant affairs where officers wore black tie, sailors dressed in swank, open-necked uniforms and snuggled with admiring Chinese girlfriends. The women, Asian and American, were
gorgeous in full-length gowns. Lucy’s escorts were always officers, and if she didn’t have an escort, she would simply go alone.
She loved George’s letters. They were funny, effusive, flirtatious, and smart. She missed being held by him, sitting on his knee, being reassured by him when her family back home was giving her the “silent treatment.” She missed his voice, his advice, that cockeyed look when he teased her. She loved him for seeing through the reserve that others mistook for haughtiness when it was little more than shyness. And when he told her, again and again, that she was “the prettiest girl in the world,” she believed him.
But there were some things George couldn’t reveal entirely to Lucy. He had attended Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, where he had been trained in chemical warfare. He was also versed in the ship’s code. On December 14, 1939, “a group of Japanese bombers about 12 flew over the ship today and sounded pretty ominous,” he wrote. Then a fight erupted with a Japanese sentry, which turned the wires “hot with code” the next morning, “and since your hubby is on the coding board . . . I was pretty busy.”
The crew of the Guam did their best to brighten a darkening mood by decorating the ship for Christmas, placing a tree on deck and, after mass and communion, serving up a turkey dinner that was surpassed only by the fruitcake and hot mince pudding for dessert. It was the first Christmas George had ever seen without snow, the first he had ever spent away from home. New Year’s marked George’s birthday, as well as his first encounter with Lucy. “Walked through a door and there you were. And now the U.S.N. has separated us . . . but ‘they can’t stop me from loving you.’ ”
Her absence only stoked his imagination. He fantasized about spending the summer with her, speculated about the “lots of children” they would have—at first twins, then a gaggle of six. But duty came before love, and a part of him found his short tours on the Yangtze Patrol “nice because when I see you on the return it’s about the best event in my life.”
In 1939 the United States imposed economic sanctions on Japan and in January 1940 terminated the 1911 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation. The Japanese made patrolling the Yangtze more difficult than ever for the Americans. Dealing with the Chinese (“friendly ‘masters,’ ” as Glassford called them) had been one thing, but placating the Japanese invaders of China (“bitter rivals”) was another. Clashes with sentries and armed patrols increased. The Japanese demanded regular inspections, which tested the mettle of even the most seasoned navy officer. They insisted on escorting the gunboats upriver, allegedly to protect them from Chinese artillery fire from the riverbank. They destroyed American property, arrested and detained foreign nationals, buzzed and even bombed the YangPat boats.
That didn’t stop the Japanese from showing another face entirely. Japanese officers drank like fish, and they enjoyed entertaining the Americans, proffering cigarettes, sake, warm champagne, and cheap scotch. But when Japanese officers began to strip to their undershirts and remove their suspenders, the Americans beat a hasty retreat—especially if there was a geisha in the house.
In April 1940 Germany invaded Norway and Denmark. By mid-May the British Strategic Air Offensive was launched against Germany’s cities, and in early June, Italy declared war on France and Britain. George now followed the news closely.
The armistice France signed with Germany on June 22 neutralized its garrison in Shanghai. The future of Shanghai’s International Settlement itself was in doubt: “Every day now the Japanese have sent a squadron of bombers out of Hankow and they fly low directly over the ship,” George wrote to Lucy. But he still clung to the hope that they could have a home in the city. That same month George participated in a poison gas exercise, and the crew of the Guam watched Universal News reels about the evacuation of Nanking and the bombing of the Panay as if to remind themselves of Japan’s deadly intentions. George also saw Submarine Patrol , the 1938 John Ford movie about an incompetent naval officer commanding an old submarine chaser and its motley crew. “Pretty good but not very humorous at this time,” he opined.
Early July saw the beginning of the Battle of Britain and the evacuation of Hong Kong. George wrote somberly: “War news . . . It looks a great deal like the U.S. is going to be involved somewhere.” The summer temperatures soared, and he chafed at Captain Harris’s enforcement of the navy uniform.
Lucy escaped the heat by taking a trip to Japan with Mary Lingenselter, an Iowa girl who also taught at the Shanghai American School. They visited cosmopolitan Kōbe, stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Tōkyō designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, soaked in the natural hot springs in Miyanoshita, and took in the views of Mt. Fuji from the banks of Lake Kawaguchi, in the heart of Fuji National Park. The farther away Lucy was, the more George pined for her. He moved her photograph so that her image was the last he glimpsed before going to bed at night and the first he saw in the morning. “Lucy,” he wrote in mid-August, “I love you so much I can’t put it into words.”
By late August 1940 the British withdrew their ground forces from Shanghai to defend Singapore, leaving the meager 4th Regiment, down to only 900 men, to safeguard the city’s uneasy status quo. In September Japan joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact, and in October Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Fleet, moved his headquarters from Shanghai to Manila. The only fleet ships north of Philippine waters were the China gunboats and the occasional navy transport.
Then in November Hart ordered the evacuation of dependents of the Asiatic Fleet, some 2,000 women and children. Lucy sailed on the Mariposa , and their parting was tense. Was this what it had come to? To have gotten this far together only to be separated by the greatest distance? To leave one home for another that had never really been? They had no choice; it was an order. George feared “difficult situations arising” between the United States and Japan, and in preparation the gunners on the Guam began machine gun practice. “Do you remember our last picture together and the song at the Candlelight Club,” he asked, “ ‘Wish Me Luck’?”
By February 1941 the Chinese were massing forces around Hankow, and the Japanese were withdrawing thousands of troops, it was bruited, downriver to Nanking. International tensions didn’t stop George from having dinner one night with the Italian consul beside German and Japanese officers. The next morning Japanese planes threatened the Guam “as if they would give anything to let loose a few bursts of machine gun fire.” That only confirmed the rumor he had heard that the Yangtze Patrol would serve as the spearhead of the Asiatic Fleet and “remain in Hankow as bait.”
Instead, the Guam returned to Shanghai in early April as the Yangtze was being closed down to traffic. Three men were on nightly watch to guard against sabotage, even though “it would be the easiest thing in the world to have us projected into a Japanese conflict by doing some damage to one of our gunboats.” Downstream a Japanese cruiser beamed her searchlight over the waterfront.
The changes in Shanghai were unmistakable. Some 20,000 to 25,000 Japanese ground troops could be mobilized around the city, which had turned into a base for Japanese Army, Navy, and Air operations. By contrast, the United States had only 800 marines ashore with attached naval personnel.
The Guam’s name had been changed as well. On April 5, 1941, she became the Wake, having relinquished her name to a large new cruiser that became part of Rear Admiral F. S. Low’s Cruiser Division 16. War was inevitable, George believed. In a letter to Lucy he apologized for getting her tangled up with a navy doctor instead of with “a good old fashioned practitioner of medicine.” On May 20, their second anniversary, he confessed that “more than half of these last two years I’ve spent trying to be content just thinking about you.”
Soon his letters would be censored. His location could no longer be divulged, and he was told by an old school chum who worked for the Daily Advertiser in Tōkyō that the Japanese perusing his mail got a kick out of his comments on the general political situation. Mail from the States had slowed down considerably since the American President
Lines ships had been pressed into service for the European theater.
In June 1941 German and Italian assets were frozen in the United States, Italy declared war on the USSR, and Germany invaded the USSR. President Roosevelt declared a national emergency. That same month the Japanese bombed Chungking, and the U.S. Embassy and the Standard Oil compound were damaged. “Maybe we’ll have a war & maybe I’ll get a bit more practice who can tell!” George joked in a diary entry of June 21. He was growing weary of the Yangtze Patrol, the mad dashes in and out of Shanghai at an admiral’s whim, the tiresome inspections by the Japanese, the lack of medical cases that truly interested him. War would be a diversion, all right, so long as it was over by November 1941, when he and his friend Lieutenant Alfred Littlefield “Smitty” Smith, medical officer of the USS Luzon, were due to go home.
That summer George and Jim O’Rourke rented an apartment in Hankow while on leave—a furnished four-room penthouse atop the International Export Company, with a houseboy, a coolie, and a gardener—all for eighteen dollars apiece per month. The two men were as giddy as new college roommates. The irony wasn’t lost on George: it should have been Lucy. “I really think if you were here I could learn to like Hankow,” he wrote. But he knew he was “trying to visualize something that will never happen.”
The Japanese had already invaded northern French Indochina with the acquiescence of the Vichy government in a brazen overture to “The New Order” in Asia. On July 24, they moved south to seize the ports of Saigon, Tourane, and Camranh Bay. President Roosevelt responded on July 26 by closing the Panama Canal to Japanese merchant traffic and freezing Japanese assets in the United States. The American, British, Chinese, and Dutch powers—the ABCD, as they were unofficially called—placed an embargo on what Japan needed most: oil.
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