Читать книгу Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg - James MacManus, James MacManus - Страница 9

‘Hankow is the most interesting place on earth.’

Hankow was one of three cities at the confluence of the Yangtse and the Han, 450 miles from the coast. It was here, halfway down the Yangtse on its journey from the Himalayas to the sea, that Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government retreated after the loss of Shanghai and Nanjing. The new seat of government, together with Wuchang and Hanyang, was part of a three-city complex known today as Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.

The only way to get to Hankow from Shanghai in 1938 was by steamer to the British colony of Hong Kong, and then by plane or train. George Hogg left Shanghai aboard the Japanese steamer Suwe Maru on 9 March. On arrival in Hong Kong he immediately took the train to Hankow. On the two-day, five-hundredmile journey he talked his way from his highly uncomfortable third-class berth into the first-class compartments. There he met a smartly dressed Chinese businessman who sold newsprint for a Dutch firm with a branch in Shanghai. Learning that his new English acquaintance was looking for a job, the man made him an immediate offer. It would greatly impress his clients, he explained, if he took an English secretary to meetings. Thus George Hogg’s first letter home from Hankow was written on the grand stationery of Van Reekum Bros Ltd, and enabled him to describe himself as a businessman.

With equal good luck, Aunt Muriel had again used her contacts to find a rented room for him in a city where the hotels were turning away even celebrity guests. The room was in the Lutheran mission, which was run by an American bishop and Oxford graduate, Logan Roots: ‘your utter charmer, a very good fellow’, Hogg called him. The mission owed nothing to the Christian ethic of frugality, and a great deal to the large funds the Church had raised in the US. Standing on several acres on the edge of the city, it was surrounded by a moat-like canal and large red-brick walls. Within the enclosure lay flower and vegetable gardens, tree-lined walks and tennis courts. Several buildings contained classrooms and dormitories for students. The mission ran an elementary school in English and a seminary for the graduates of Chinese high schools.

The Bishop, who was within a few weeks of retirement after a lifetime in China, had good political contacts with Chiang Kai-shek’s circle. In the spirit of Christian liberalism, and perhaps political opportunism, he also entertained senior communists and rented rooms to known communist sympathisers. Chou En-lai, then leading the communist delegation in Hankow, would drop in for tea, as would the government’s Premier, H.H. Kung. Chou spoke good English, and made a point of seeking out journalists staying at the mission.

Hogg had certainly landed on his feet. Within days of arriving he wrote home to say that the city was ‘the most interesting place on earth’. And he was right. Hankow’s history as a concession port, its neoclassical European architecture and its teeming Chinese slums had plenty to interest an enquiring journalist.

The provisional capital was one of the Yangtse River cities opened up to foreign trade by the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin. The treaty had been imposed upon the Emperor in Beijing after the British inflated a minor incident into a major diplomatic confrontation. Not to be left out, the French seized on the murder of a missionary in a part of China not yet opened to the West, and joined the negotiations. Germany and the United States followed suit. Ten new ports were opened to the Western powers along the Yangtse River. In each a number of concessions were granted, allowing the British, French, Germans and Russians to create foreign enclaves with wholly independent powers of policing and taxation. The enforced granting of extra-territorial concessions was humiliation enough for the Emperor. The affront was sharpened with a clause in the treaty which opened all of China to foreign missionaries, Catholic and Protestant alike.

The Bund, or river embankment, at Hankow was a metaphor for the imperial diktat that Europe had imposed upon China. The elegant buildings that lined the river not only reflected Western tastes in architecture, but as far as possible were made off-limits to Chinese. The banks, offices, government buildings and the great homes of the wealthy merchants were all lovingly created to mirror the taste and style of home. The heart of the city, with its high-rise buildings, theatres, cinemas, cafés, broad boulevards and bustling riverfront was wholly European in style and layout, even though surrounded by China. Horse-racing at an elegant track on the city outskirts was a focal point of the social scene, and the club buildings, the stands and the surrounding parkland had been designed to lead the spectator to believe that he was in the heart of Surrey.

George Hogg’s lifestyle at the Lutheran mission compound may not have been up to the expatriate standards of comfort, but there were servants to look after him, good food at the Bishop’s table and a laundry service. In his first letter home he described other foreigners who had also taken advantage of the Bishop’s hospitality. Among them were Peg Snow, wife of the American correspondent and author Edgar Snow, famous for his book Red Star Over China (1936), and, as Hogg put it, ‘an American woman authoress who at one time rode all over the place with Mao’s Eighth Route Army’.^* The woman was Agnes Smedley, and she was to play a crucial role in the next few months of Hogg’s life. A self-proclaimed communist supporter, and author of the bestselling autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929), Smedley had become a leading member of the fast-growing Hankow press corps.

Hankow was the wartime capital of China for the first ten months of 1938. It was a Mecca for foreign correspondents, diplomats, hangers-on and spies, and therefore a natural destination for any young journalist looking to make his name and earn some money. Franco’s victory in Spain that year had left famous correspondents, small-time stringers and a host of photographers all looking for the next war. While Hankow remained in Chinese hands it became another Madrid, another beleaguered capital making a final and, as it turned out, doomed stand against the forces of fascism. Many of the journalists who arrived were battlehardened veterans of the Spanish Civil War. They needed a new war, preferably one that offered their readers moral certainties.

When George Hogg arrived the front line was still several hundred miles distant. The fighting would remain far from the new capital for months thanks to an important, and rare, Chinese victory over the Japanese army at a small town called T’aierhchuang, which meant the nationalist government was able to delay the final assault on the city until the autumn.

After their conquest of Nanjing, the Japanese had pushed north in an effort to take the important railway centre of Xuzhou in Jiangsu province, which would give them control of the north– south rail links through the heart of China. The ancient brickwalled settlement of T’aierhchuang, on the banks of the Grand Canal, stood in their way. After two weeks of street fighting, which destroyed much of the town, the Chinese appeared to retreat. Two days later, on the evening of 6 April, thirteen divisions of Chinese troops counter-attacked, led by the 31st Division, so famed for night assaults that they were called ‘the sleep robbers’. In an overnight battle the Japanese were routed, losing ten thousand killed or captured out of a force of thirty thousand men.

Robert Capa, a twenty-four-year-old photographer already famous for his work in the Spanish Civil War, had gone into action with the Chinese troops, carrying only his camera. Life magazine, whose editor and proprietor Henry Luce was taking a close interest in the conflict, spread the photos over two pages, beginning the accompanying story with a battle-cry of an opening paragraph: ‘To the names of small towns famous as turning points in history, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Verdun add still another. It is T’aierhchuang.’ History was not to be as kind to the Chinese army as it was to the victors of those earlier battles.

The front and the fighting may have been far away, but Hankow had plenty to offer a young man trying to break into journalism. The city provided the influx of famous correspondents with a perfect vantage-point for the next stage of the struggle by a united Chinese front against the forces of fascism. The communist– nationalist front was probably more genuine at this period than at any other time in the years 1938–45. Chou En-lai and a large communist delegation had moved into Hankow to take up their roles in the front government. There was also a big German military delegation in the city, led by a German World War I hero and former Nazi, Captain Walter Stennes, who was advising Chiang Kai-shek.

Above all there was a great cast of foreign correspondents, mainly American, who had assembled in the city: Haldore Hanson of the Associated Press, Edgar Snow of the Saturday Evening Post and the Daily Herald in London and his wife Peg, otherwise know by her nom de plume Nym Wales, Jack Belden of United Press International and later Time magazine, Tillman Durdin of the New York Times, Art Steele of the Chicago Daily News, Agnes Smedley for a range of American radical magazines, and Freda Utley of the News Chronicle in London.

The arrival of Peter Fleming of the London Times with his actress wife Celia Johnson was a publicity coup for the Chinese government. Fleming was a well-known figure on London’s literary and social scene and had received acclaim for his first book, News from Tartary, describing a journey from Peking to Kashmir, published in 1936. Although later overshadowed by his elder brother Ian, the creator of James Bond, it was Peter who first became famous. His marriage in 1935 to Celia Johnson, who would star in Brief Encounter with Trevor Howard in 1945, was a high-society wedding that had greatly excited the gossip columns of the day. Celia Johnson was a star in her own right who had performed leading roles in a series of West End stage hits; her film career did not begin until 1941.

Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden arrived in the city on 8 March 1938 and were quick to meet up with the Flemings. The Times correspondent had clearly overdressed for the occasion: ‘In his khaki shirt and shorts, complete with golf stockings, strong suede shoes, waterproof wristwatch and Leica camera, he might have stepped straight from a London tailor’s window, advertising Gents’ tropical exploration kit,’ wrote Isherwood in the diary that would form part of Journey to a War. Isherwood also decided that, despite their earlier reservations about the perils of wartime China, they were in the right place: ‘Today Auden and I agreed that we would rather be in Hankow at this moment than anywhere else on earth.’

Like many other new journalists in Hankow, Auden and Isherwood contacted Agnes Smedley soon after arriving. They found her in her room at the Lutheran mission, where she immediately began to cross-examine them on their political views. Smedley did not have a lot of patience with those who did not agree with her radical opinions. She had already met George Hogg at the mission, and saw in him a naïve, unformed, innocent abroad who was prepared to approach the war in China with an open mind. She also saw a tall, good-looking young Englishman. They became friends as well as colleagues, but although Smedley was famously liberal with her sexual favours, it is unlikely that they became lovers.

Hogg described her as ‘tall, rather grim and Eton cropped, about forty, an ardent communist of the Chinese not the Russian variety’. He was certainly awestruck by the strength of her views and the way she furiously argued her case with other members of the US press corps. Smedley believed that the government of Chiang Kai-shek was a crypto-fascist organisation, and that the communists held out the only hope for China. This was not a popular view at the time, but Smedley made it her life’s work to offend those in power, those she worked with, and most of her friends.

It was remarkable that a flamboyant feminist and radical activist who became a publicly outspoken supporter of the communist cause in general, and Mao’s brand of Chinese communism in particular, should have formed a friendship with a rather naïve young Oxford graduate. But Smedley was an unusual woman, with an extraordinary past. Her latest biographer, Ruth Price, presents a well-documented case that Smedley was in fact an agent of the Comintern, the organisation set up in Moscow in 1919 to foment communist revolution around the world.

She had been born in rural poverty in Missouri in 1892, and when she was ten her family had moved to the coal country of Colorado. Her father was a labourer by profession and a drunk by inclination. Her mother died from malnourishment when Agnes was sixteen. Her father rifled the few savings she had hidden away – $45 – and went to get drunk with the boys. Agnes was left at home with a younger sister and two brothers. She also had charge of a baby born to an elder sister who had died in childbirth. She took a decision then that she was to live by all her life. She would not play by society’s rules. She would not live as other women did, and certainly not as a drudge looking after four children and a drunk of a father.

Making rudimentary arrangements for the children, Agnes left home to begin a life of semi-vagabondage that was to last for years. She arrived in New York in her early twenties, worked as a waitress during the day and by night studied at New York University. Here, during the years of the First World War, she became politically active among Indian exile nationalists seeking to overthrow the British Raj. Typically, Smedley was not content with political posturing. In 1918 she was convicted and jailed for gun-running and violating America’s Neutrality Act. Thus began her life as a radical, which was only to end with her death in 1950, while she was under investigation for espionage.

Her biographer Ruth Price described Smedley as ‘a virago who challenged the world…Smedley sparked intense, divergent responses in a tremendous range of people in her lifetime.’ Political conservatives saw her as either a dizzy camp-follower of the Chinese communists or a dangerous revolutionary to be suppressed at all costs. Fellow journalists dismissed her fervent reportage as wholly slanted; others were offended by her morals: she publicly boasted of sleeping with ‘all colours and shapes’. Those who actually knew her saw either a troubled and unstable eccentric or an impossibly soft-hearted dreamer. ‘I may not be innocent, but I am right,’ was one of her sayings, but it might well have been, ‘I went too far – and then further.’

By the time Smedley arrived in China in 1929 she had already been branded a dangerous radical by conservatives. The Frankfurter Zeitung refused to publish her first reports of Japanese atrocities after the invasion of Manchuria. But she was proved right, and became a leading correspondent for the paper until the Nazis took power in 1933. Her London publisher, Victor Gollancz, drew her to the attention of the Manchester Guardian, which also appointed her a correspondent in China.

As in every other city that has hosted journalists in a time of crisis – Saigon and Salisbury, Rhodesia, in the 1970s, Jerusalem at almost any time and Beirut in the eighties – the foreign correspondents gathered at one particular watering hole to gossip, drink, fall in love and betray each other. In Saigon it was the bar of the Continental Palace, in Salisbury the Quill Club, and in Beirut the Commodore Hotel. In Hankow it was both the US naval canteen and the nearby Terminus Hotel. The modern history of Hankow is closely connected with that of the Yangtse Patrol, a US naval detachment which was there to protect the American presence and personnel in the city, and whose fleet of gunboats operated from the riverfront. As far as the press was concerned the real contribution of the patrol was its canteen, which like the US Navy was supposed to be dry. Since the Hankow press corps spent so much time there, one assumes they managed to circumvent the rules.

Smedley was a key figure among the correspondents who gathered in the naval canteen or the Terminus Hotel, where strong drinks were obligatory. She introduced George Hogg to the other members of the press corps, and he quickly found himself a novice member of their fraternity.

Years later Rewi Alley, a New Zealander and communist sympathiser who was also in Hankow at the time, and who was to play a crucial role in Hogg’s life in China, commented on Hogg’s relationship with Smedley.

George was amazed at the liberated nature of Smedley’s social life and the openness of her communist views. She liked him because he wasn’t like others in the press corps. He had brought no views of his own to China apart from the pacifist ideals of his family. And Smedley thought those were faintly ridiculous because the Chinese were fighting for their survival. She believed that you had to fight for everything that you got in life. And he agreed with her. They were friends but I think that was all.

Smedley liked Hogg, and wished to convert him to her own view of communism. She also let him use her bank account in Hankow to cash cheques, and became a source of good advice on where to go to find the story. George had known and loved strong, unconventional and ‘difficult’ women all his life. His mother and aunt were strong-minded people with unconventional views for the era in which they lived. Smedley was like a more dangerous version of Aunt Muriel, without, however, the strict middleclass manners and morals with which the Hogg family were brought up.

There was another larger-than-life figure who enlivened and illuminated the Hankow scene. Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr had been appointed British Ambassador to China in early 1938, just after the embassy moved from Nanjing to Hankow. Clark-Kerr was an unconventional and colourful character. He and his blonde Chilean wife Tita made a point, both in Hankow and later in Chongqing, of holding parties that mixed nationalists, communists, journalists and businessmen. With golden curls, tiny, perfect features and the trace of a Spanish accent, Lady Clark-Kerr looked like an exotic doll. Behind the baby-doll image lay an intelligent and well-informed woman. The Ambassador and his wife were prominent members of Hankow’s social life, and made a point of forging good relations with the press corps.

Agnes Smedley was almost as surprised as the other guests when she was invited to dine at the Ambassador’s imposing residence one night. She turned up in a borrowed dress, expecting to be vilified for her views on the British Empire. She had after all been jailed twenty years earlier in New York for gun-running for the nascent Indian nationalist movement. But Sir Archibald surprised her. She found him to be ‘a lean brown Scotchman with a keen tough mind and a scintillating sense of humour’ who clearly, if discreetly, shared her views on the nationalist government. Unable to reconcile his charm and sympathetic political views with his role as British Ambassador, Smedley concluded that he was a ‘good Scotchman fallen among diplomats’. More importantly for George Hogg, that night Clark-Kerr revealed two important facts that Smedley would pass on to him. They would change his life.

The Ambassador told his guests that he was an enthusiast for a plan to set up industrial co-operatives in rural areas to replace China’s shattered industrial infrastructure and to help arm and equip the forces fighting the Japanese. Silence fell over the table as he explained that he had been much impressed by the New Zealander Rewi Alley, who was trying to persuade the government to back the idea. According to Smedley, one of the guests spluttered that Alley was an illusionist chasing a will o’the wisp. In that case, said the Ambassador, it might not be a bad idea if more people pursued that will o’the wisp.

Clark-Kerr made it clear to his guests that he was going to help Alley, and would promote the idea of industrial co-ops to Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Meiling. He was true to his word. The wife of the Chinese leader became an enthusiastic supporter and organiser of the plan to create small-scale factory workshops in rural areas. She was crucial to the early successes of the movement.

Alley at that time was working as a municipal employee, inspecting factories in Shanghai. But he moved to Hankow for several weeks in 1938 to work on the co-operative project, and there he briefly met George Hogg. Smedley, who was also an enthusiast for co-ops, introduced the two men in the hope that Hogg would write an article about the project. He made a note to investigate the supposed rural renaissance of China’s industry, and left it at that.

Having found lodgings at the Lutheran mission, Hogg had next to find the money to pay the rent. Bishop Roots may have been a good Christian, but he wasn’t in the business of giving free accommodation to itinerant journalists. And money remained a problem.

Hogg’s job with Van Reekum Bros required him to spend from 9 a.m. to noon at a smart Hankow hotel where the Chinese businessman saw his customers. His wages just covered his rent, leaving no money to buy an essential piece of equipment for any freewheeling journalist in the city, a bicycle. He was so short of money that instead of the promised fortnightly letters home, he told his parents that they would get a longer monthly letter to save on postage. He also urged them to use lightweight paper and envelopes, as he had discovered to his dismay that he was charged for items over a certain weight. It is one of the more extraordinary features of the war years in China that the postal service insisted on such bureaucratic niceties, and indeed managed to function at all. But function it did, and although some of Hogg’s parents’ letters to Hankow failed to get through, many of them did reach their destination. Letters from the UK to China went by sea via Hong Kong, and thence by train. After the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese in 1941 the main postal route to China from England was via a long and unreliable overland journey through Russia.

Hogg tried to raise money by teaching English at the Russian diplomatic mission, and then at Hankow’s university. He signed up to teach courses in English and economics in the new academic year which was to begin in September – but by then the Japanese were at the gates of the city, and the university closed.

However, his problems were partly solved, and his life changed, when he was offered a job as a stringer, or part-time correspondent, for United Press International. It came with a monthly retainer of US$80, a reasonable sum given that the local currency was in the grip of rampant inflation. Hogg immediately gave up his job with the Chinese businessman and bought a bicycle.

UPI, whose motto was ‘Around the world around the clock’, already had, in Jack Belden, a famous full-time correspondent in Hankow, and from time to time the agency sent out other star correspondents, such as Betty Graham, to cover the conflict. Belden was part of Agnes Smedley’s ‘Hankow gang’ and it is probable that it was she who introduced the young Englishman to the veteran American reporter. Belden would have been only too happy to have a young trainee to do the legwork around town for him.

The UPI job was a huge stroke of luck for Hogg. It gave him press accreditation, which provided access to people and events that were shaping the course of the war. It gave him all-important status in the press corps. Above all it gave him an education in the bedrock of journalism, news reporting. UPI had been founded in 1907 as a rival to Reuters and the Associated Press, and challenged their supremacy with livelier, more colourful stories. Roy W. Howard, the UPI chief in Washington, believed that rival agencies were far too sombre and boring in their reporting, and encouraged his correspondents to inject colour and human interest into their despatches.

George Hogg’s UPI reports have long since been lost, but his writing for the Manchester Guardian and in his letters home show how quickly he absorbed the demands of his editors in Washington. The new job ended plans for a teaching career. For the next eighteen months he would learn the art and craft of being a foreign correspondent. It was hard work, which brought scant praise from his editors. But he learnt how to shape a short news item, and how the right quote or telling detail can illuminate and enliven the most mundane story.

Hogg was lucky. There was nothing mundane about the story he had to cover. From the moment he set foot in China the undeclared war between Japan and China had gathered pace, providing gruesome copy for the newsmen as the casualties and the atrocities mounted.

In May 1938 the Japanese finally took the railway town of Xuzhou. After the brilliant rearguard action at T’aierhchuang, the Chinese commanders had failed to follow up their advantage. The nationalist armies were soon continuing their retreat across central China, taking up new positions in the great ring of mountain ranges that surround Hankow and its two sister cities.

The Japanese were now in full pursuit. Unabashed by appalled Chinese reaction to the Nanjing atrocities, and encouraged by the comparative lack of any international condemnation, the Japanese forces used the same terror tactics of mass executions of wounded and captured troops, and the mass murder of the civilian population in towns and villages, as they swept inland. Everywhere they went the army of Emperor Hirohito created brothels and filled them with Chinese women for the troops.

In retaliation, and to slow the advance, in early June 1938 the Chinese dynamited the great Yellow River dykes, causing the river to burst its banks and sweep across the path of the advancing armies. The surging river carved a new course to the sea across the plains of Honan, drowning thousands of Japanese soldiers, miring armoured vehicles in mud and cutting rail and road communications. The loss of civilian life was massive as the floodwater swept away eleven large towns and four thousand villages. Two million people were left homeless and destitute. The number actually drowned remains a matter of controversy, but figures as high as 325,000 have been given. In military terms the tactic was a success, and the final assault on Hankow was delayed by at least three months. But, embarrassed by the civilian casualties, the nationalist government denied for years that it had deliberately breached the dykes.

As the Japanese pressed forward Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek ordered all industrial machinery in the Hankow region to be dismantled and transported further inland. This was part of a broader strategy to remove population, government, schools and factories from the vulnerable coastal areas to the interior. It was a dramatic move. China’s economic and political life sprang from her great cities on the coast and in the river valleys in the centre and south of the country. The vast provinces of the interior, Szechuan, Yunnan, Kwangsi, Hunan, Shanxi and Gansu, were now to become the base for the fight against the Japanese. Faced with Japan’s better-equipped and -trained armies, Chiang Kai-shek had chosen to use China’s vast territory and limitless supply of manpower to engage the invader in a war of attrition.

In the spring of 1938 Chiang was fifty years old, a professional soldier who had gained international recognition as the leader of the world’s most populous nation. But his control over party and country had never been complete, and was continually challenged. He had entered the army at the age of nineteen, and emerged from the anarchic years that followed the collapse of the Manchu dynasty^* in 1912 as a protégé of the nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen, generally acknowledged as the father of modern China. Sun Yat-sen was a Methodist Christian who had received much of his education outside China, in Hawaii. In 1912 he forged a number of revolutionary republican splinter groups into the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT), with the aim of overthrowing the old imperial order and creating a modern republic on the European model. Elected as provisional president of the republic of China a year later, Sun Yat-sen found himself powerless in the face of regional warlords, and was forced to resign within months of taking office.

The decade that followed was one of humiliation and anarchy. Lacking any kind of central government, China fell under the control of regional warlords and foreign powers. The two men whose destinies were entwined in what would prove a long and murderous struggle for supreme power emerged from the years of darkness on separate paths to leadership.

In 1921 a stocky young man who had worked as a teacher, a librarian, a bookseller and a journalist joined the new Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. His name was Mao Tse-tung, and at the age of twenty-seven he would abandon his previous careers and become a professional revolutionary.

The following year Chiang Kai-shek was sent to Moscow to seek support and funds for the KMT. He returned to report that communism was simply tsarism under a different name. Russia’s real interest, he argued, lay in sovietising China. In 1924 Chiang became director of the Whampoa Military Academy, a training school for the new class of officer in a national army. It was no surprise that when he assumed control of the KMT after Sun’s death in 1925 he consolidated power in a divided party by breaking with the communists. To enhance his political legitimacy in the eyes of his party he then married Sun’s sisterin-law Soong Meiling in the same year. Meiling’s family were Christian, and Chiang was converted and baptised in 1929. But it was not until March 1938, at an extraordinary congress of the KMT in Hankow, that Chiang was finally accorded the title of Director General. This was the office through which Sun Yat-sen had wielded dictatorial powers. Chiang’s dominance of the party, but not of the country, was complete.

The politics of the nationalist government did not, however, concern George Hogg. He and the Hankow press corps were interested in only one story – the war. The fighting was coming closer as spring turned to summer in 1938, but the conflict was still difficult to cover with any accuracy. The real front line throughout the war was anywhere Japan chose to deploy its airpower. Although thwarted in their advance on the city, the Japanese were able to bomb Hankow at will. Hogg had witnessed the after-effects of artillery and mortar fire in Shanghai. Now for the first time he found himself in the line of fire.

In May, June and July 1938 squadron after squadron of Japanese bombers flew over the three cities in the Hankow complex at heights of between ten and fifteen thousand feet, above the range of Chinese anti-aircraft batteries. The planes flew with perfect precision in parallel lines, and first targeted Hankow’s airfield and then largely, but not exclusively, the poorer Chinese areas of the three cities.

Writing from Shanghai, Hogg had been careful not to alarm his parents with stories about the violent world in which he found himself. From Hankow he began to expose them to the reality of what was happening around him. The adolescent tone of his letters began to change as he adapted to life under almost daily air attack. The golden boy who went to Oxford and the naïve young graduate who left to travel the world had been transformed into a hard-working reporter covering the grisly aftermath of air raids on a rusty bike. On one occasion he followed up a brief agency report that no damage had been done when a Japanese plane released its bombs over open countryside. In fact a small village had been hit. He sent the story, called ‘No Damage’, to the Manchester Guardian.

The little Chinese house of wattle and straw stood alone on a dry patch of ground among the rice paddies. Through years it had seen nothing but the daily lives of its farmer folk and their domestic capital. Men and women scarcely distinguishable, a succession of children, a few pigs, ducks and water buffalo, had been indiscriminately sheltered – from the oldest toothless one down to the latest baby, litter or calf. But on this sunny morning something was wrong with the old house.

Jagged cracks ran slantwise down its walls, and it was perched askew on its raised hillock like an old and disreputable hat. Evidently it had achieved sudden fame, for a crowd of excited people was milling round it, and more could be seen coming from all directions along the paths between the rice paddies.

Nicely arbored between the two projecting wings of the house and almost entirely filling the courtyard, lay the huge carcass of a water buffalo; this seemed to be the centre of interest, but some way off a small group had discovered a pair of hairy hind legs, emerging from a bundle of red crushed meat. Attention was suddenly diverted from these as a woman raised the side of an overturned wheelbarrow to reveal a mangled human body. She held the barrow up for the crowd with one hand, using the other to help her in a mumbled incantation. The crowd peered curiously at the remains and went off in little groups to swap emotions at a safe distance; some of them threw the woman a few pennies before leaving. Meanwhile the mourners’ dirge and the smoke from burning paper money came from a half-open door into the house itself where the body of a woman, perfectly unhurt save that it had no head, was lying fully clothed on the floor. The sight of her unshrouded body, headless and thick with child, excited only a sort of pitying wonder. It was at once too near the ordinary, and too far beyond the limits of ordinary experience, to bring horror.

Hogg was now working hard to win the acceptance of both his fellow journalists in Hankow and his editors in Washington. He was just twenty-three years old, and very inexperienced to have found himself a member of such a prestigious press corps. Like most young men in that position, he probably did not realise the extent of his good fortune. But he certainly made the most of it.

Many of the press corps were veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and they recognised that the Japanese tactics of ‘total war’ were based on those of General Franco in Spain. Japan’s air campaign was influenced by German advisers who used methods that had already been tested in Spain. One of these was that Japanese planes always bombed munitions stores and factories before attacking military or civilian targets in a given area. The aim was to cripple efforts at reconstruction after the raids.

As in the Spanish Civil War, the press corps did not aspire to neutrality. Thus, when on 29 April 1938, the Emperor Hirohito’s birthday, the Chinese hit back against the Japanese there was general rejoicing among the journalists in Hankow. On that day a spectacular dogfight took place over the city, involving fifty Japanese bombers supported by fighters against eighty planes of the Chinese air force, piloted by Russians. The Chinese claimed that in the thirty-minute duel twenty-one Japanese planes were shot down, for the loss of seven of their own. Russian pilots in the Chinese air force were joined by US pilots in what the press called ‘the flying foreign legion’, a motley group that included volunteers from France, England and New Zealand. They flew and fought for China for the first five months of 1938, before being disbanded due to indiscipline.

At a time when the Chinese government badly needed propaganda victories to bolster its authority, it scored a triumph in May 1938, when its planes attacked mainland Japan. Hogg was in Hankow at the time, and he, like every other correspondent, missed the biggest story in the air war between Japan and China.

Flying from their base at Hankow, Chinese air force crews in two giant US-made Martin bombers flew a three-thousand-mile round trip to a number of Japanese cities including Kyushu, Nagasaki and Fukuoka. The bombers, which refuelled twice on their way to the Chinese coast, only dropped propaganda leaflets printed in Japanese and describing atrocities committed against the Chinese civilian population. The need for extra fuel tanks for such a long mission prevented them from carrying out the original plan, which was to bomb Japanese bases. Details of the mission were kept secret for several days, and were only released for publicity to offset the news of the Japanese victory at Xuzhou.

Throughout the spring Hogg worked closely with Jack Belden, who would go on to become a famous correspondent for Time magazine. Belden, born in Brooklyn and educated in New Jersey, spent his college vacations travelling the world as a seaman, and fell in love with the Far East while in Hong Kong. After graduation he shipped out as crew on a cargo boat to the British colony, and stayed on in China. He learnt the language fluently, became an English teacher and wandered into work for UPI.

Belden possessed two big advantages over the rest of the Hankow press corps. He could speak Mandarin fluently, and he was a close confidant and friend of the US military attaché Colonel Joseph Stilwell. The two men gained access to frontline areas denied the rest of the press corps, although Stilwell insisted that the information he gave Belden was shared with them.

Hogg concentrated on reporting the harrowing situation in Hankow while Belden, five years his senior, filed from the battlefront. It was a winning combination for UPI. For Hogg it was a compressed education, and not just in war reporting. Belden had assumed the role of his mentor. Hogg, who only a year earlier had donned mortarboard and gown to receive his degree from Oxford, was now sitting at the feet of a moody, alcoholic boss who wrote from the battlefield with poetic insight.

The eight months that Hogg spent in Hankow proved a transforming experience. His initial orders from the UPI desk in Washington were to report on the disease and epidemics that were rife among the population. He arrived as spring transformed the city at the end of a long and bitter winter. The trees were in leaf, the gardens were in bloom and the temperatures climbed to those of England in July, although the heat was close and clammy. Rickshaw coolies stripped to the waist and ran sweating through the streets. Chinese troops switched to light tropical uniforms and the foreign community, at least the men, suddenly appeared in white shorts and jackets.

From the journalists’ point of view the change in weather was a boon. It increased the tempo of news, bringing epidemics of dysentery and cholera to the shanty towns and, under clearer skies, heavier Japanese air attacks. It was a toss-up as to which posed the greater threat. ‘The chances of catching malaria, cholera, and typhus are as great as those of being hit by a piece of shrapnel or of being caught in the wreckage of ancient wooden buildings,’ Hogg wrote in a letter home.

He spent his days investigating death by disease in the cities of Wuchang and Hanyang across the river, while at night he was out reporting on the victims of the latest bombing raids. He travelled on his bicycle and on the military trucks that ferried the wounded to hospitals. With Bishop Roots’ daughter Frances and a couple of musicians he met at the Lutheran mission he formed a jazz quartet. In both Chinese and English, the group would perform impromptu concerts at schools and hospitals. Hogg had a good voice for jazz. ‘Show that man a piano and he will give you a song,’ a colleague said.

Throughout the spring and early summer Hankow turned itself into a city under siege. Fortifications and machine-gun positions appeared at key points across the city. Large reinforced wooden gates set in concrete beds were placed at the ends of the main streets, which were lined with double rows of barbed wire to prevent the rapid movement of enemy troops through the city. The foreign-controlled concessions began planning ‘safety zones’ which, it was hoped, would guarantee the security of those inside if the Japanese stormed the city.

This was a year before the outbreak of the war in Europe, and two and a half years before the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. The two major foreign concessions in Shanghai were still in Western hands, and like Hong Kong would remain inviolate until they were attacked and taken hours after Pearl Harbor.

The Chinese business community believed that the number of foreigners and foreign-owned businesses in Hankow would save it from the fate of Nanjing. Every conceivable excuse was found either to paint foreign flags on, or fly them from, the bigger buildings. Large inscriptions in Mandarin and English were painted on foreign-owned offices and banks stating that the property was mortgaged to, or owned by, a foreign company.

In public at least the communists and their senior partners and implacable enemies in the united front, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, insisted that the army would fight for the capital. The Generalissimo, as Chiang Kai-shek was known, was rarely seen in Hankow, preferring to remain in his headquarters across the river on the south bank. He had good reason to avoid open movement through his capital. The Japanese had numerous agents in the city, and had placed a large price on his head. Tokyo’s spies were not discreet about their activities. Hogg and his colleagues would watch during night air raids as rockets were fired into the sky to guide the bombers to strategic targets such as the power station by the river.

In contrast to her husband, Chiang’s wife Meiling was to be seen everywhere, travelling on foot, by rickshaw or in her official car. Dressed impeccably, she visited schools, hospitals and factories and bombed-out slum areas. She became the public and compassionate face of a government that showed little concern for the suffering of its civilian population.

Meanwhile, on his daily journeys across the two rivers Hogg found that Hankow’s twin cities were dying under the weight of air attacks and disease. He wrote home: ‘You can walk for hours between ruined houses in the musty smell of rotten woodwork and rubbled plaster. Here and there you will find a family camping in what was once its own home or an old woman mumbling to herself as she pokes among the ruins of her past.’

Most of the population of the two cities had sought refuge in the countryside or had crossed the river to seek shelter on the streets of the foreign concessions. Government officials, foreign missionaries, rickshaw men, beggars and refugees moved into whatever quarters they could find in Hankow. In the summer heat the streets became a battleground between pedestrians and every kind of transport. In the midst of this frenzied city life, 330 British sailors busied themselves building barbed wire fences around the British consulate. Their gunboats were moored along the Bund and, like the Chinese troops in and around Hankow, they spent the steamy summer awaiting events.

Most days the press would meet at lunchtime in the US naval canteen, where alcohol was strictly on a bring-your-ownbottle basis, and by night at the Terminus Hotel, where the reverse applied. The journalists took grim satisfaction in reminding themselves what had happened in Nanjing and agreeing that the Chinese efforts to hold Hankow were doomed. With the mixture of cynicism and pessimism that is a hallmark of their tribe, they speculated endlessly about what the Japanese would do once they had taken the city. Everyone else was playing the same guessing game. The brutal Japanese behaviour in the field since Nanjing had been fully reported in the local papers, heightening fears among the Chinese of what would happen if the Japanese penetrated the defences of the city, whose population had swollen to 750,000.

In this doom-laden atmosphere Hogg and other journalists formed a ‘Last Ditchers Club’ which met regularly at ‘Rosie’s Dine, Dance and Romance Restaurant’. In every city at war the press always finds or creates a ‘Rosie’s Restaurant’. There would be farewell dinners for the ‘deserters’ who were leaving town, and bets were placed on who would hold out the longest. As it happened, UPI’s young English correspondent would be among the small group who did hold out the longest.

While in Hankow, Mao’s chief representative, Chou En-lai, took great care to cultivate the Western press. He met journalists regularly at the Communist Party’s headquarters, and encouraged his aides to be as helpful as possible with briefings. Chou was always careful not to criticise the nationalist government, and to stick to the united front policy positions. Throughout his life the one principle from which he never wavered was the party line, and his slavish obedience made him the ideal apparatchik in Mao’s eyes. To the Western press he was a charming and skilful spokesman for the communist cause. To Mao he was an invaluable organiser and enforcer.

Chiang Kai-shek, on the other hand, tended to regard most of the Western press corps as dangerous subversives. And in his terms he was not wrong. The collective sentiment in the foreign press corps when the war started was anti-Japanese; as the conflict continued and the united front began to crumble, so the bulk of the foreign press became more openly hostile to the nationalist government, and more sympathetic to the communists and their guerrilla armies.

While Chou En-lai received the more important correspondents, especially the Americans, Chiang Kai-shek saw only favoured visitors such as the proprietor of Time and Life magazines, Henry Luce. The government’s trump card as far as the media was concerned was the Generalissimo’s wife, Meiling. She spoke perfect English, and became skilled at presenting the government’s case to the American public; in turn she became the subject of admiring interviews.

In June, before the Japanese closed in on Hankow, Hogg managed to make a train journey north to Xian, and thence by truck to the new communist headquarters at Yenan. It was here that Mao Tse-tung had retreated with his forces after the Long March in 1934–35. Agnes Smedley set the journey up for him, but Hogg delayed his departure for days, torn between his desire to see the communist base and his reluctance to leave his friends and colleagues in the beleaguered city.

Expressing these concerns in a letter home on 3 June, he also gave his parents their first view of his new friend Smedley. With schoolboy enthusiasm he wrote:

This Smedley is a real revolutionary. She has given every penny more or less to those projects I told you of (refugee organisations), has collected thousands of dollars for them but made no provision for herself. She is known as a communist by the foreigners so they won’t have much to do with her. She cannot have Red army status because they don’t have any foreigners except doctors. Because she is known to be connected to them she cannot even get a job with the Russian embassy who are scared of getting into bad odour with other consular and ambassadorial staffs. Her new American passport which she got after great trouble from the American officials was stolen on delivery by Chinese fascist detectives…if the Japanese come they will undoubtedly kill her.