Conduct Under Fire Page 2
A small-town schoolteacher from Wausau, Wisconsin, whose father was a conductor on the Northwestern Railroad, she may have come from a humble background, but she had an almost regal bearing born of self-confidence and the cool consciousness of her physical charms. She blossomed at Wausau’s high school, where she enjoyed her popularity, planning parties, decorating for dances, serving on the student council, and playing the role of queen in the Waugonian Carnival. She even dated the captain of the football team, but she would not be wooed by either frivolousness or sport. She knew what the young doctor meant, and his intentions were earnest, in spite of a puckish demeanor and thick, bushy eyebrows that gave him a somewhat quizzical look.
George Theodore Ferguson and Lucille Ann Halada (pronounced “holiday”) were married at St. Peter’s Church by Father Urban Eberle in Chicago on May 20, 1939. His mother, unhappy with the prospect of losing her only son, refused to give the union her blessing. It was a small ceremony. The only Ferguson present was George’s little sister, Jane, and the only Halada was Lucy’s father, Roland. And it was a short ceremony, too, since they were on their way to San Francisco, where they would board the President Garfield for their trans-Pacific voyage. George looked dapper in his crisp navy whites. Lucy, as George called her—or Duchess when he teased her—wore a sleek black suit that defied fashion and tradition and made an indelible impression, even if it aroused in Jane that old superstition “bad luck.”
He had little knowledge of Japan’s war with China, its desperate need in the wake of the Depression to feed a growing population, acquire raw materials, and assuage the appetite of young militarists whose ethos would permeate all aspects of Japanese life, from the highest ranks of the Imperial Japanese Army down to kindergarten. Nor was he aware of Japan’s historic animosity toward the United States. For George, like many American men, war was an abstraction, and military service a means to an end: it provided steady employment, paid for one’s education, and paved the way to a prosperous future.
He was an optimist by nature, reared on the pioneer spirit of his hometown Kansas City, Missouri, that port of entry to the American West where the Missouri River bends north, the Big Blue River snakes south, and enterprising young men hit the overland trails. He was gifted with his hands, knew he could make things work, not just in theory but in practice. His childhood friend Jeanne Gier, a first cousin who had vowed as a little girl that one day she would marry him, marveled at his dexterity and determination. George once rigged a telephone line by stringing wire and tin cans through his neighbors’ backyards on 53rd Street Terrace, and if the reception, both literal and figurative, was less than he had hoped for, it didn’t deter him one whit from pursuing other engineering feats, like building a radio—from scratch. Another time his mother, Mary, came home to find her vacuum cleaner laid out piece by piece on the sidewalk in front of their house. She nearly burst into tears, but once he put it back together, she found that it worked even better than before.
He realized early that to fully understand how something functioned, you first had to take it apart, analyze the pieces to see how they fit together as parts of the whole. How else could you learn about transmission, suction, or locomotion? His skill came easily, and his curiosity sought ever greater challenges. The satisfaction he derived from his accomplishments gave him a sense of control that fostered not smugness but a belief in the possibility of doing good and the plausibility of a greater beneficence. A Catholic, he regularly attended mass on Sundays.
But some things were beyond one’s control. After the crash of ’29 his father, George, lost his job in the new field of time management. The Fergusons lost their house, piled nearly everything they had in their car, and headed out for Detroit where George’s uncle lived, only to have their car—and everything that remained in it—stolen. His father landed a job in Milwaukee as a beer salesman for Blatz’s brewery but would wind up back in Kansas City before settling in Chicago. Money was a constant worry.
George was the first in the family to go to college, and he worked summers cleaning out beer vats at Blatz’s to help pay for his tuition. From Marquette University he proceeded to the Naval Medical School in Washington, D.C., where orthopedics stoked his ambition. The field inspired him, the complicated way in which a simple gesture, like shaking someone’s hand, for example, depends on the deviation of the radius and the ulna, while the tendons that come down from the inner aspect of the elbow and the volar move your fingers as the biceps and brachioradialis leverage your elbow. The names of the tendons themselves bespoke a malleable but lasting strength—Flexor sublimis and Flexor profundus. It was so beautifully worked out—the architecture of the body—the muscles and ligaments that give the human skeleton its shape and mobility, our stature and footing in this world. He was a man, you might say, who made an immediate impression and understood literally what sustains us, what moves us, what endows us with presence.
Lucy stole his heart. He couldn’t say he really knew her; their courtship had been too brief for that. But he knew he loved her, he deferred to her, and he delighted in amusing her. Poised and as pretty as Greer Garson, she brought out the best in him, made him think the sky was the limit as they embarked on the greatest adventure of their lives.
Along with the service uniforms he had purchased in serge and elastique from Kassan-Stein’s Custom Tailors in Washington, D.C., including a five-piece full-dress outfit, a blue raincoat, and a beaver overcoat, he packed a complete set of golf clubs, tennis and squash racquets, an 8mm Eastman movie camera, a Zeiss camera, and a small library of medical textbooks, Dorland’s Medical Dictionary and Steindler’s Orthopedic Operations among them.
The word was out: the Asiatic Station was a plum assignment. Work hours were short, nightclubs beckoned, the parties were lavish, and the liquor and women were cheap. The temptations were enough to entice any bachelor and sufficiently varied, with golf, horseback riding, hunting, and fishing, to satiate the officers who brought their wives along with them.
But the fact remained that Japan had been at war with China for the better part of a decade. In September 1931 Japan blamed the Chinese for blowing up the South Manchurian Railway, which the Japanese Kwantung Army had sabotaged as a pretext to annex Manchuria. In January 1932 the Japanese attacked Chapei, the Chinese quarter of Shanghai, only to meet fierce resistance from the Nineteenth Route Army. In July 1937 the Kwantung Army staged another “incident” at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking as an excuse to launch the second Sino-Japanese War. And in August Japanese forces again invaded Shanghai, this time emerging victorious and departing only after China agreed to the terms of their truce. By December 12 the Nationalist capital of Nanking had fallen to Japanese soldiers, who in an orgy of rape, mutilation, and mass murder killed an estimated 200,000 Chinese civilians. That same day Japanese Navy pilots bombed and sank the USS Panay above Nanking, the first Yangtze Patrol gunboat lost in eighty-three years of service.
The accounts of Japanese brutality in Nanking that reached American readers through Frank Tillman Durdin in The New York Times, Archibald Steele in the Chicago Daily News, and C. Yates McDaniels of AP, as well as in George Fitch’s stills in Life magazine, were chilling. But it was the attack on the Panay up from Nanking that seized the public’s attention. The sinking of the Panay on December 12, 1937, was a mistake, the Japanese averred after a howl of American protest, which quieted down once Japan forked over a $2.2 million indemnity. The incident hardened American resolve against Japan and American support of China. But the real concern was business. That was the purpose of a continued American military presence in Asia: to patrol the Yangtze River, the 3,500-mile lifeline to China’s vast interior, where Standard Oil, Texaco, and Asiatic Petroleum had operations; to protect the U.S. Embassy in Peking and keep railroads open for American products; and to guard the International Settlement in Shanghai, a task assigned to the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the U.S. 4th Marine Regiment under the command of Colonel Samuel L. Howard.
George and Luc
y sailed from San Francisco on June 11, 1939, and luxuriated in their three-week sojourn to Hawaii, Yokohama, and Manila. The staterooms on the President Garfield were comfortable, the meals elegantly served, and the drinks flowed—a concerted effort by American President Lines to make “travel Round the World” accessible “with continuous service on a clock-like schedule” for something less than a fortune. Hawaii was paradise, George wrote his sister Jane from the garden of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, “with all kinds and colors of birds flying around. Just walked up Waikiki Beach to the Aquarium and this p.m. will go out to Palau which is an ancient battlefield.” On July 1 they disembarked the Garfield in Manila and proceeded to Shanghai aboard the SS Empress of Asia.
They were dazzled by their entry into China. Shanghai teemed with activity. An elegant corniche known as the Bund curved around the Whangpoo River, anchored by the stately Customs House and distinguished by the neoclassical architecture of Shanghai’s banks and foreign businesses. On the other side were gangplanks and catwalks leading up to the ships and small cruisers that plied the waters next to square-bowed junks with colorfully patched sails and sampans that floated like butterflies.
The vibrant clash of cultures couldn’t have been more exotic. Streets bustled with cars, bicycles, peddlers, and pedestrians. Natives pushed wheelbarrows, pulled yellow rickshaws, or rode water buffalos bareback down Tibet Road. The sounds of hawking, talking, singing, and catcalling filled the air, which was pungent with the smell of raw fish, garlic, and charcoal smoke. In a Hongkew sukiyaki house you might hear half a dozen languages spoken at once—Russian, German, English, French, Italian, and Dutch in addition to Japanese and Chinese. But for all of its Asiatic accents, Shanghai was a city that catered to Western tastes. The Shanghai Sunday Times duly noted the arrival of George and Lucille Ferguson on its society page, with captioned cameo photographs of the newlywed couple.
Shanghai rises from the ancient mudflats of the Yangtze delta, its name meaning “above the sea.” Since 1842, when the Treaty of Nanking terminated the Opium War, it had been open to the West and was divided into foreign enclaves, outside the old walled city, that were independent of Chinese law. The British dominated shipping, and in 1863 they consolidated their sector with the American concession to form the International Settlement.
The largest port in the Far East, Shanghai attracted merchants and traders, manufacturers and bankers, refugees and revolutionaries. It was the entrepôt of the Orient, its fleshpot, too, and in the 1920s and 1930s was a magnet for actors and playwrights, philosophers and poets from Charlie Chaplin to Noël Coward, from Bertrand Russell to W. H. Auden. Said Oxford aesthete Harold Acton: “Everywhere one jostled adventurers and rubbed shoulders with people who had no inkling how extraordinary they were: the extraordinary had become ordinary; the freakish commonplace.”
Shanghai was hot, humid, and crawling with people, Acton wrote, like cicadas scurrying up a dunghill. Chinese laborers were mercilessly exploited in Shanghai’s textile mills, three-quarters of which were foreign owned. Women and young girls toiled twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for less than $15 per month. In a city of 3 million Chinese residents in 1932, there were 50,000 licensed and 100,000 unlicensed prostitutes.
That same year 30,000 corpses were plucked from Shanghai’s streets. By 1935 average life expectancy in China was twenty-eight years; in Shanghai it was even less. Foreigners could indulge in a sybaritic lifestyle built on the backs of cheap coolie labor, while the opium trade and prostitution flourished in parlors and backstreets. It was not uncommon to see bodies of Chinese floating down the Yangtze, victims of Japan’s war with China.
Soochow Creek divides the city and flows southeast before emptying into the Whangpoo River, a branch of the Yangtze that elbows southwest. The Japanese occupied Yangtzepoo and Hongkew to the north, which they used as a base of operations for attacks against Chapei, headquarters of the Shanghai-Nanking defense area. The International Settlement stood to the south, while the old city hugged the near shore of the Whangpoo and bumped up against the French concession to the west.
By the late 1930s the Japanese represented the largest foreign contingent in Shanghai. Only 10,000 British and Americans inhabited the International Settlement, which the Chinese and Japanese regarded as neutral. But since the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the U.S. 4th Marine Regiment had taken a more active role to prevent the conflagration from spreading. Known as the China Marines, they had come to Shanghai in 1927 after Chiang Kai-shek, who aimed to free China from the tyranny of local warlords and foreign influence, marched into the city at the head of the Nationalist Army and routed the Chinese Communist Party.
The two-battalion regiment had an average strength of 1,200 officers and men who were responsible for the internal security of the International Settlement. They piled up sandbags, strung barbed wire across the bridges spanning Soochow Creek, and searched anyone crossing into their sector for arms and contraband. Their unofficial mascot became a mongrel pup that was picked up by B Company guards along the riverbank and named, fittingly, Soochow.
If things got hot for the leathernecks along Soochow Creek, they were even hotter after hours. Shanghai was a carnival of delights for young American men whose only previous contact with the opposite sex had been at church socials. “We was nineteen and pussy was ten cent,” as Private James Carrington indelicately put it. “We were lovers instead of fighters,” clarified Private Alton C. Halbrook, who drew $20.80 each month, belonged to a private club, had his own rickshaw, and partook of regular evening entertainment. “This town would ruin anybody in no time,” the old China hand Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell famously said. “The babes that twitch around the hotels need attention so badly that it is hard not to give it to them.”
The social hub for sailors and marines was the 4th Marine Club on Bubbling Well Road, where men drank, dined, gambled, and ambled on to their next nighttime destination: The Majestic? Or the English men’s club at the Palace Hotel, where they could puff on Havana cigars between sips of British ale and talk of current events?
The Chinese girls were simply irresistible. With dresses slit up to their thighs and silk blouses without bras they were more than willing to join a fellow on liberty for a meal or a drink. Many of the women in Shanghai—Chinese, Japanese, or Korean—lived with American, British, or French military men, often with more than one man at a time. Cecil Jesse Peart, a navy Pharmacist’s Mate, shared a young Chinese woman with a shipmate of his until he saw his pal in the regimental hospital “giving the lab tech a little, narrow glass slide with a urethral smear on it.” Their friendship continued, but not their common interest.
Sex was the lingua franca, and the talk was cheap. For the equivalent of one U.S. dollar you could purchase a bottle of Pinch scotch. Seven cents would get you a pint of vodka, and if you wanted, you could even buy a concubine. There was a brothel located near the regimental hospital on Gordon Road, which “made it rather handy for our medical staff,” admitted Peart.
The officers preferred blondes, and the blondes were White Russian women who in their glittering beauty seemed to walk right off the silver screen. They haunted the Café de la Paix in the French concession and baited the men as slyly as Circe trying to snag Odysseus. Fluent in numerous languages, some tended the bar, while others worked the dance floor, where they encouraged smitten sailors to buy them watered-down drinks, dance for a dime a turn, and believe, for a moment, whispers of love.
Many of the White Russians were well educated and of noble birth, they said, having fled Russia after the 1917 revolution and migrated to China via Mongolia and Manchuria. They were “White” because they had remained loyal to the tsar instead of to Lenin. By 1934 an estimated 25,000 lived in the city, the second-largest foreign population after the Japanese. Many of them were also down on their luck and had children and parents to support.
The women worked as seamstresses, shopkeepers, hostesses, and harlots. While some toyed with the affections o
f drunken river rats, others sought the illusion of stability offered by a man in uniform and made every attempt to tie the knot at the Russian Orthodox church. The U.S. government frowned on such marriages and would recognize only ceremonies performed in the consulate.
Between nights on the town and fooling around, the lifestyle in Shanghai was so rich that the regiment had to order “conditioning hikes” for the marines, who walked around Shanghai carrying their weapons while trying not to gag on the stench of the honey-cart operators who dumped raw human waste into the sewers that lined their route. The marines lived like kings.
George and Lucy kept an apartment at the Cathay Mansions in the posh French concession, whose tree-lined boulevards evoked Haussmann’s Paris. The rooms were furnished, the beds were made with Irish linen sheets, and the bathrooms were neatly tiled in black and white. From the rooftop garden you could see the river. They dined across the street at Le Cercle Sportif Français, known as the French Club, where evenings began at 10 P.M. but didn’t hit full stride until 2 A.M. And on Sundays they liked to venture out of Shanghai for an afternoon of golf at the Columbia Country Club.
The important thing was neither the food nor the entertainment; it was being alone and being in love, and for five heavenly months they made plans for where they would live, the number of children they would have, the make and model of their car—a little Plymouth convertible or a coupe?—and the kind of medical practice George would set up. Shanghai was their honeymoon, a time of unbridled hope and misplaced certainty, and in the confluence of the two they strove to make every minute count.