Conduct Under Fire Read online

  George’s summer vacation was bittersweet, an unacknowledged farewell to a world that was vanishing before his eyes. Bombers flew up to Chungking daily. Inflation reared its ugly head. Hankow was being drained of its foreign population. The Japanese outnumbered the Americans and British at the Race Club twenty to one. Captain Kenneth N. Lowman, the Fleet Surgeon, assured George that he would be returning to the States on time. George couldn’t wait to meet Lucy in San Francisco, then begin his residency at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. He began counting the days until Christmas. “Isn’t there a song called ‘All I Do Is Think of You’?” he asked.

  George found his medical responsibilities superseded by military ones. Doctors, of course, were noncombatants, and the Hague Convention prohibited them from engaging in combat except in self-defense. In the field they were required by the 1929 Geneva Convention to wear a brassard that displayed a red percale cross on a white rectangle of cotton. Pinned to the left sleeve above the elbow, it was stamped on the inside with an identity card number, which was the same as that on the Geneva Convention identification card that doctors and corpsmen were supposed to carry.

  “I can load a rifle in the dark, use a submachine gun, fire the Lewis machine guns of the ship, handle a riot gun with dexterity and a killing gleam, put on a gas mask in fifteen seconds, and the rescue breathing outfit in twenty, fire a .45 revolver or pistol with ‘deadly accuracy’ at 50 yards, use a Browning automatic rifle with the best of them and even use the Morse code a ‘little,’ ” he wrote in exasperation to Lucy. “What a doctor.”

  Such measures weren’t taken without reason. The security of the International Settlement was at stake, as well as the fate of hundreds of foreign nationals who remained in the Yangtze River valley. In early September Admiral Hart concurred with the recommendation of Colonel Howard of the 4th Marines and Admiral Glassford that the time had come to evacuate all naval forces in China. A unified Northern Command incorporating American and British interests was established, with Admiral Glassford at the helm. Plans were quickly formulated to take a last stand in Shanghai, or to withdraw up the Whangpoo into Free China. Then in November Admiral Hart ordered Glassford to withdraw all naval forces in North China to Manila.

  Colonel Howard prepared to evacuate the two battalions of the 4th Regiment to the Olongapo Naval Station on Subic Bay in the Philippine Islands. They would embark on two American President Lines steamers, the Madison and the Harrison, which would arrive in Shanghai from Manila and Hong Kong respectively. The ships were refitted as transports and flew the Naval Reserve pennant. They were supplied with extra lifejackets and rafts for the marines and given procedures for radio communication with Admiral Hart’s staff in Manila. On the journey north to Shanghai, officers on both the Madison and the Harrison noticed the ominous tide of Japanese troop ships and naval vessels heading south. The Madison and the Harrison would sail from Shanghai under submarine escort, transporting a regiment of some 800 men. Ammunition, field equipment, medical supplies, rations, motor transport, clothing, and household effects were loaded onto the Harrison, in that order of importance.

  On the evening of November 26, the American Club hosted a farewell party for the marines. The next day, Thanksgiving back in the States, Colonel Donald Curtis’s 2nd Battalion left Shanghai on the Madison. On the morning of the twenty-eighth Colonel Howard led the 1st Battalion and the last of the 4th Marines down to the President Lines dock on the Bund, followed by the regimental band and colors. Thousands of spectators turned out. A Scotsman in full kilt stepped onto the balcony of the Foreign YMCA playing his pipes in their honor. Near Jimmy’s on Nanking Road a band of Americans dressed in restaurant whites joined the procession, adding a little American swing. “Outwardly we cheered, smiled, and waved,” remembered one spectator, “but inside we knew we’d never see them again.” As novelist J. G. Ballard later wrote in Empire of the Sun, “The 50-year-long party that had been Shanghai” had come to an end.

  Meanwhile the flat-bottom river boats of the Yangtze Patrol were being readied for their first oceanic voyage. Naval supplies and medical stores were emptied from warehouses, packed, and loaded for transport. Spare propellers and parts were stashed on the gunboats. Communication equipment from the regimental radio station was stripped and installed in the building of the Consulate General. And if something couldn’t be taken, like the radio tower, it was taken down and sold as scrap or destroyed.

  Chinese workmen outfitted the Luzon and the Oahu with watertight window shutters and steel doors, raised the blower intakes, and secured the masts, funnels, and lifeboats. But their decks remained only a few feet above the water.

  On November 24 the Wake left Hankow “like a Bat out of Hell,”13 George wrote in his diary. Two Japanese ships escorted her, and she was back in Shanghai on November 28. She was to remain behind as the communications ship of the Consulate General.

  As soon as the Wake pulled alongside the Luzon at 2:30 P.M., George received orders to take passage on the President Harrison, which was departing at three o’clock. Colonel Howard had already bid adieu to the crowds on the Bund. George barely had time to pack. He scrambled into a gig, headed down the Whangpoo, and clambered up the ship’s ladder to make it on deck by 2:55. The last contingent of the 1st Battalion was already on board. Once at sea, they received their orders from Admiral Hart. The President Harrison would first unload the 4th Marines at Olongapo, where they were charged with the beach defense of Subic Bay under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Thurston Beecher. Then she would complete the final leg of her journey to Manila, sixty miles to the south.

  Shortly after midnight on November 29 the last U.S. naval forces withdrew from Shanghai. By dawn the Luzon, carrying Admiral Glassford and George’s friend, medical officer Lieutenant Alfred Littlefield Smith, had steamed past the Yangtze fairway buoys and was heading south in the China Sea, followed by the Oahu. The sea was calm and the weather was clear until the Luzon pulled out of the lee of the islands off Hangchow Bay. Then the wind picked up, and the waves began to surge. It was the season of the northeast monsoon.

  To avoid the storm, the captain set a course south by southwest. That way the Luzon would pass through the Formosa Strait, taking advantage of the lee formed by Formosa’s western shore and repairing to Hong Kong if necessary.

  On the morning of December 1 a squadron of Japanese planes flying in perfect V formation appeared overhead at a mere 3,000 feet, then disappeared to the south, only to reappear in the north, a maneuver that was repeated throughout the day. The Luzon increased her speed from fifteen to seventeen knots. By the time she approached the northern tip of Formosa, the seas were high and the troughs long. Instead of taxing the steering engine and using too much rudder, the helmsmen learned to “let her yaw.” The little ship rose up the waves, then slid down them, with a disconcertingly sharp roll. Lifelines enabled officers and crew to walk about the ship without worry—until Japanese men-of-war were spotted on the horizon.

  One Japanese destroyer passed between the Luzon and the Oahu flying the international signal for “Stop.” A little later another cautioned, “You are heading into danger,” while a third insisted: “Head north immediately.” A Japanese cruiser aimed its guns but withheld its fire. The American gunboats cavalierly answered by hoisting an “interrogatory” signal, indicating that the commands had not been understood or were being summarily ignored. Later that afternoon a Japanese merchant ship sped up astern of the Luzon, its searchlight flashing an unintelligible message.

  The gunboats resumed their southerly course. The Luzon radioed Admiral Hart in Manila, who dispatched the minesweeper Finch and the submarine rescue vessel Pigeon, should the gunboats require assistance. But the rescue vessels themselves needed help. The Pigeon had not only damaged her rudder on the high seas, she had lost one of her anchors. The Finch, which had to tow the sister ship, had lost both anchors and limped toward the lee of Formosa for repairs.

  Japanese aircraft and men-of-war shadowed th
e little fleet through December 2 and 3, but the gunboats faced another, more immediate danger. Once they were in the Formosa Strait, the seas turned choppy and they could no longer ride the waves. A northerly gale combined with a strong current blew up mountains of water. The gunboats soared to a peak, then lunged into a receding crest, pitching 28 to 30 degrees in a breathtaking three-second roll. A wall of green water slammed into the forecastle of the Luzon while the surging sea engulfed the stern, threatening to turn the ship broadside. The captain worked furiously to keep the swells behind him. He cut the speed and steered gingerly. The engine raced anyway, grinding, whining, a terrifying, inhuman sound of metal straining against metal that sent a shudder down the Luzon’s spine.

  As the gunboats neared southern Formosa, a Japanese cruiser flying a Rear Admiral’s flag approached the Luzon, sending an “Admiral to Admiral” signal. By searchlight it requested, “Please alter your course ten degrees to the left to clear our exercise area,” and that was all. Glassford breathed a sigh of relief; he was happy to oblige.

  The change in course oriented the Luzon and the Oahu directly toward Manila, but getting there was hell. Glassford now realized it would have been wiser to have avoided Formosa entirely. As he clung to a weather rail of the Luzon’s bridge deck just before dawn on December 4, he wondered if they would make it. Not the gunboats, which had performed valiantly, but the men themselves. At one point the Luzon rolled a heart-stopping 45 degrees to starboard, then 46 degrees to port. Smokestacks choked on water. Al Smith watched dishes that had been on a shelf protected by a side rail come sailing over the deck and smash into pieces. Waves lashed the Luzon with such force that her sides were indented between the ribs. The Oahu was in even worse shape. The ship’s inclinometer recorded an almost unbelievable roll of 56 degrees to starboard and 50 degrees to port. The forward hold and the ship’s officer and forward crew’s compartments were flooded. For two nights the stalwarts of the Yangtze Patrol had gone without sleep and hot food. It was impossible to sit down without being jerked around violently by the ship’s movements, much less rest.

  And then, in an event as miraculous as the sunrise itself, they found themselves in the lee of Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, where the water was as smooth as glass. By the evening of December 4 the Luzon and the Oahu, storm-battered but safe, arrived in Manila. Under clear skies the next day, the fifty-five-year-old Admiral Glassford lowered the two-star ComYangPat flag, and the Yangtze Patrol, after eighty-eight years of operation, was officially dissolved, its gunboats attached to the navy’s Inshore Patrol.

  The President Harrison had arrived in Manila on Tuesday, December 2. The journey was comparatively calm for George Ferguson and the 4th Marines, except for a reported strafing during the night. Machine guns had been strapped to topside rails, and blackout procedures were enforced. The men cheered when four American D-class submarines sent to escort them north of Formosa surfaced and displayed their colors. George was temporarily assigned to the Cañacao Naval Hospital, just south of the Cavite Navy Yard in the 16th Naval District. As he eagerly anticipated his orders for departure, he quartered at the Avenue Hotel in Manila.

  On December 4 George heard the news he had been aching for: Fleet Surgeon Kenneth N. Lowman informed him that he would be leaving Manila the following Monday via the President Grant. The long-awaited day had finally come. After more than two years as a Yangtze Patroller, George Ferguson was going home. Now he and Lucy could celebrate their first Christmas—and anniversary—together, fulfill the dreams they had shared in the letters they had written each other almost every day across an ocean of time. Now they could start a family.

  The day was set, December 8. Back home, across the international dateline, it was Sunday, December 7, 1941.

  2

  Pearl of the Orient

  FOUR MONTHS EARLIER, in August 1941, Lieutenant (j.g.) Murray Glusman watched crowds of well-wishers from the deck of the President Garfield as she prepared to sail from San Francisco. The air was filled with the shouts and cheers of families and friends. The young navy doctor looked elegant in a white suit offset by a dark necktie and complemented by white shoes, but he knew no one there. He threw a streamer of confetti toward the dock and watched it flutter into the bay to become, in a moment, no more than a bit of refuse.

  The President Garfield now avoided Japan and skirted the Caroline and Mariana Islands north of Guam, which were under Japanese control. The ship was prohibited from radioing its position or announcing its arrival. But the cloak of secrecy made the nineteen-day journey to the Philippines no less pleasurable for its passengers—mostly military—with stops in Honolulu, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and finally Manila.

  It was the most luxurious trip Murray had ever taken. Meals were sumptuous, movies were shown on deck, and there was gambling and of course drinking. He mixed with officers, socialized with civilians, and chatted with Lieutenant (j.g.) John Jacob Bookman, a fellow graduate of NYU’s College of Medicine. He read in the reclining wooden chairs on the promenade, tried out his brand-new Graflex Speed Graphic camera, and gazed at the seabirds and flying fish skimming alongside the ship and the dolphins dancing in its wake. At night you could see the Southern Cross pinned to the dome of the sky. He was as far as he had ever been from home.

  He loved the sea, the patterns of light on water, the pull of tides and currents, the smell of salt on skin. As a child in New York City, he had watched huge ocean liners—the Franconia and the Mauretania, the sister ship of the Lusitania—steam up Ambrose Channel and through the Narrows before they entered the Upper Bay of New York Harbor and tied up at their Hudson River berths on Manhattan’s West Side. He imagined the vast distances they traveled, the distinguished guests and movie stars among the thousands of passengers they transported halfway across the world. Once he salvaged a naval history of the War of 1812 from a garbage can, took it home, and pored over it in the evenings, losing himself in the dramatic illustrations and stories about the sloops Hornet, Wasp, and other early American warships. And when he was a resident in neurology at Welfare Hospital on Welfare Island in the East River, he thrilled to the sight of PT (Patrol Craft Torpedo) boats darting up on practice runs from their base in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where Lieutenant (j.g.) John Bulkeley commanded Submarine Chaser Division 2. One day a submarine nosed so close to Welfare Island, you could almost reach out and pet it. With its seemingly limitless horizons, the sea aroused in him a sense of mystery, challenge, and freedom.

  His father, Lewis, had fled Odessa to avoid conscription in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. His mother, Sophie, had emigrated to escape the poverty and pogroms in Kiev under Tsar Nicholas. They arrived in America as teenagers not speaking a word of English, met, married, and had three children. They settled at 335 East Houston Street, two of 1,562,000 Jews who emigrated to the United States between 1881 and 1910 and turned Manhattan’s Lower East Side into the largest Jewish community in the world. “Little Israel,” it was called.

  The building on East Houston was a shtetl unto itself, with a butcher, grocer, furrier, hat maker, bootblack, bookkeeper, and even a few peddlers among its residents. The tenants were mostly Russian and Austro-Hungarian; a few Italians lived next door. Lewis learned enough English to finish first at the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, then set up his own drugstore. An observant Jew, he kept a kosher household but still worked on Saturdays.

  His life in America revolved around his business. He never seemed to enjoy the independence his long work hours had earned. A stern man with a quick temper, he denied himself almost any luxury. The atmosphere in the house was stultifying for his elder son, Sidney, and his youngest child, Estelle. She remembered Lewis hunched over a table at night, reviewing the day’s accounts, a bare lightbulb overhead.

  Houston Street was in the heart of the city’s Tenth Ward, which in 1900 was the most crowded spot on earth. Eighty-two thousand people lived in a half-square mile, more than 700 people per acre. It was squalid, noisy, and cramped, with six-story wal
k-ups, basement apartments, windowless tenement rooms, and sweatshops. In 1914, the year Murray was born, a male garment worker earned about thirty-five cents an hour. At night the neighborhood came alive with dance halls.

  The clash of Old World and New, sacred and profane, enfranchised and dispossessed, created fertile ground for political activism and artistic innovation. The sculptor Jacob Epstein, the painter Max Weber, the novelist Henry Roth, and songwriters Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin all had their roots in New York City’s Lower East Side. Home to the Jewish Daily Forward under Abraham Cahan, the largest Yiddish daily newspaper in the world, it was hearth to the fires of trade unionism, socialism, communism, and anarchism. Many of its denizens were first-generation Americans determined to make it—in business, law, medicine, and entertainment—and to do so on their own terms.

  The store on the corner of East Houston Street sold patent medicines—elixirs and emollients, salves and solutions—and prescribed drugs that Lewis made by hand with a mortar and pestle, calibrated carefully and packaged individually. Large glass jars labeled in Latin held medicinal powders. Amber and cobalt bottles with green stoppers lined high wooden shelves that were reached by a sliding ladder. Pills were stored in small oak filing drawers until they were counted out onto a pill board and poured into bottles to fill prescriptions. Business transactions took place in a backroom, where a clerk by the name of Max Levine balanced accounts. Sophie spent much of her time at the front of the store, greeting friends and neighbors, exchanging gossip and news. The family rarely ate together, except for an occasional meal at Ratner’s on Delancey Street, because work was Lewis’s priority.

  Patrons relied on Lewis for medical advice and first aid. He was the liaison to the nearest hospital in case of an emergency—a broken bone, for example—that he couldn’t treat. The first recorded telephone exchange in America originated in a pharmacy, and since few of Lewis’s neighbors had phones in the 1920s, they used the drugstore for incoming and outgoing calls. As a young boy, Murray collected nickel tips for delivering messages left by callers.