Historians have well-remembered the 'Flying Tigers,' young World War II-era American Air Force pilots who voluntarily abandoned lives of uneventful training nights to defend China against Japanese bombers. But a much smaller group of their contemporary American 'volunteers' in China is scarcely noted.
These were Shanghai-based American publishers and correspondents, who might have transferred to a safer place during and after 1937 but stuck it out in order to tell the story of Japanese aggression to the world. They jokingly called themselves the 'Sitting Ducks'.
The Sitting Ducks were finally to live up to a no-longer whimsical name: The Japanese Army descended on their havens in the International Settlement and French Concession of Shanghai, on Dec. 8, 1941, and they began to pay the price of dedication, some with their lives.
Among the most steadfast and heroic of these spokesmen for afflicted China was the man made to suffer most by the Japanese—John Benjamin Powell, known to his friends as 'J.B.' A modest and self-effacing University of Missouri journalism instructor, he traveled to China in 1917 for the experience and adventure. He found, in addition, a cause for which he willingly risked his life—reporting a China under invasion and torment.
J.B. set sail for China, while World War I was still in progress, to work for old China hand Thomas Millard, the first of a bevy of University of Missouri journalism graduates to work in and for China. Together, they founded the first English-language news magazine in Asia, Millard's Review of the Far East. When J.B. inherited full ownership and responsibilities in 1923, he changed its name to the China Weekly Review, the name it retained until Japanese gendarmes raided and suppressed it on Pearl Harbor Day.
The Review served the general community needs of the foreign population of Shanghai in routine ways, before its chance came to play a daring role serving China's threatened sovereignty.
It began when the Japanese Army invaded the Manchurian area in force, in Sept. 1931. J.B. hurried to Mukden to report for his own magazine, and as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Britain's Manchester Guardian.
His reports created a world sensation.
Japan's alibi had been that the Chinese had bombed the South Manchurian Railway, which Japan then operated and protected with limited Japanese troops. J.B. quickly discovered that the reported bombing was a total fraud.
Moreover, he dug up and published photographs of Japanese soldiers in civilian clothes, being clandestinely moved to Manchuria by the thousands. They were to await a signal there to launch the full takeover right after the phony incident. Japan could never refute nor fog over this relentless expose. For J.B., it was to mean future Japanese retribution.
The world climate in 1931 was afflicted by the Great Depression, and the great European powers of the time devoted little time to worrying about Manchuria. The League of Nations censored Japan and applied weak sanctions against her, without many of its members necessarily being too sympathetic about what was happening to China. After all, a number of these very same nations had, for 100 years, been grabbing as much Chinese soil as they could; what they really resented was that Japan was beating them at their own game.
But this could not be fairly said of the United States, and an early issue of the China Weekly Review specifically reminded historians as well as its general readers of a little-remembered incident in China back in 1852.
At that time, in consequence of the First Opium War, Shanghai already had a British Concession. Corrupt local Manchu authorities-doubtlessly for a good price-now attempted to transfer a sector of Chinese Shanghai north of Suchow Creek, called Hongkew, to a copycat group of U.S. missionaries and businessmen. And immediately after the deal was signed and sealed, this group of would-be imperialists moved joyously into Hongkew to raise the U.S. flag over the new 'American Concession.'
When the word reached Washington, the American government would have no part of the deal. The U.S. Congress ordered its red-faced expatriates to lower the U.S. nag and never again attempt to raise it for such purposes on sovereign Chinese soil. Thus, 14 years before the birth of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the United States was in official support of what would be the first of his Three Principles of the People.
It was not unreasonable, therefore, that J.B.'s reporting from Manchuria should have (in the views of a subsequent British historian) done more than that from any other source to consolidate American public opinion on the side of China's territorial rights.
In spite of the official U.S. position, corrupt Ching Dynasty officials were determined to sell Hongkew to foreigners. When it was appended to the existing British Concession across Suchow Creek, that marked the beginning of the International Settlement. Before long, however, Hongkew was swarming with Japanese instead of American businessmen.
During the Boxer Rebellion, the International Settlement was sectioned into 'defense sectors' garrisoned by the various nations for the protection of their nationals. Hongkew became the Japanese Defense Sector, and, unfortunately for China, Shanghai's new Central Post Office was erected there.
After the Manchurian Incident, patriotic Chinese wishing to settle scores with the Japanese often attacked them in Hongkew. This became Japan's excuse for invading and occupying Hongkew at the start of the Sino-Japanese War. Most people have the impression that Japan respected and refrained from molesting the International Settlement until Pearl Harbor Day. In reality, Japan invaded and largely wrecked half of the Settlement in 1937.
But no matter what kind of distressing news came out of China, not a lot could be done in 1931 with depression beleaguered U.S. President Herbert Hoover. As a young man, in 1900, his own life had been threatened by the Boxers in Peking. Under the severe strains of the depression, he seems to have given little thought to Manchuria, no matter how many other Americans felt. Hoover was replaced by Franklin D. Roosevelt early in 1933, and when the Japanese Army launched a new aggression and seized Jehol, J. B.'s continuing forceful reports fell upon more sympathetic Washington ears. Indeed, many Americans began boycotting Japanese goods and lobbying their Congressmen to forbid scrap metal sales to Japan's war industries.
War came dangerously closer to the editorial office of the Review in 1932, when activities of patriotic Chinese and their own boycott of Japanese goods gave the Japanese Army and Navy new excuses to violate Chinese sovereignty. Japanese Marines landed in Chinese Shanghai and fought a heavy battle with Chinese Nationalist troops, wrecking the Chapel District and killing thousands of civilians.
On this occasion, the outcry from the Shanghai press, with the Review in the vanguard, brought world pressure on Japan, and her troops withdrew.
But it was after July 7, 1937 that J.B., his magazine, and the other Sitting Ducks were able to give their most effective help to China, as her years of greatest travail unfolded.
The Japanese were ready to seize more Chinese territory, first around Peking and then in Shanghai. By sheer chance, one of J.B.'s journalism students at the University of Missouri was a bright young Chinese who enrolled simply as K. Tong (but was soon adorned with the rather pretentious given name of Hollington).
The ensuing Western teacher-Chinese student relationship was akin to that, earlier, of Dr. James Cantlie with his medical student, Sun Yat-sen; ripening on the Columbia, Mo. campus it was also to have historical significance. In due course, the J.B. Powell-Holly Tong team would become one of China's main communications lifelines.
By the time Japan was ready to launch her supreme effort to subjugate all of China, Dr. Hollington K. Tong had become China's Minister of Information and had restored close contact with his old teacher in Shanghai.
In 1937, scores of newspapers and magazines were being published in China in a score of languages. Virtually all, except the obvious ones, owned or bribed by the Japanese, saw clearly that China was in the right and exerted them selves to support her.
But the danger now was both very real and very close. The Japanese Army maintained links with a virtual army of Chinese gangsters, ready to do any dirty work for them. These thugs, later taken over and paid by Chinese Quisling Wang Ching-wei, were available to terrorize or even assassinate any newspapermen, foreign or Chinese, considered too troublesome to Japan's ambitions.
Publishers had to be very cautious about what they printed locally. And so did foreign correspondents. More than one were forced into hiding from Japanese hit men. But not all were intimidated. In his major work, Chiang Kai-shek, Dr. Hollington K. Tong reported:
"Two of Shanghai's English periodicals came out strongly and courageously for China and were outspoken in their condemnation of Japanese aggression. One was the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury, edited by Randall Gould, and the other was the China Weekly Review, edited by J.B. Powell."
The moment the fighting commenced around Shanghai, a Japanese spearhead moved inland along the north bank of Suchow Creek and captured the Shanghai Central Post Office. Because of the curious history of Hongkew, its only established 'defenders' were themselves Japanese, under the direction of the Japanese Consulate-General.
Had the post office been located across the creek, it would have been defended by the U.S. Fourth Marine Regiment, the Shanghai Volunteer Force, and other authorized militias. As things turned out, all these men could do was lean on their guns and watch.
The capture of the Shanghai post office, of course, confounded the existing problems of the Settlement's corps of correspondents, who now had no means of filing uncensored stories. Japanese Army press officers now read and 'corrected' every written or telegraphed word sent to the outside world. All that the news-hungry papers and magazines around the world could get from the front-page Shanghai fighting front now was neutral or pro-Japanese reports.
J.B. and the Sitting Ducks were only momentarily sidetracked by the Japanese. They erected a super-secret short-wave radio station on the roof of the Hamilton House (the equipment belonged to the American Press Wireless Company; the operator was Alban R. Lusey).
Thereafter, a steady stream of compelling reports on the atrocious Japanese behavior in Central China successfully by-passed the Japanese censors, though they knew there was a big leak somewhere. The Sitting Ducks outsmarted them for more than four years.
J.B. organized an underground of informers to report on Japanese atrocities, now everyday occurrences in Hongkew and the other Shanghai districts captured by the Japanese Army. These written reports were smuggled out by special Chinese couriers to Hollington Tong's staff, first in Nanking and later in Chungking.
The operation was so well organized and deeply hidden that its American newspapermen participants did not even know about each other. The only payment any of them ever received was the undying gratitude and affection of older generation Chinese who learned about their activities.
The entire situation in Shanghai finally became so threatening that the U.S. Department of State, in Oct. 1940, ordered the Matson Line's Australia service passenger ship, 'Monterey', to divert via Yokohama to Shanghai and evacuate Americans in both places. Dependent family members of all U.S. government employees were required to join the ship; in addition, many other Americans, including some journalists, volunteered to leave.
But J.B. did not even consider leaving his post or abandoning the mission he had accepted. Fortunately, all of his family members, who had alternated between China and the U.S., were safely in Missouri.
The Wang Ching-wei puppet government for China had been a long time in forming. In the summer of 1941, 'President' Wang and his cabinet were publicly put on display in Tokyo, where they received the credentials of ambassadors from Germany, Italy, and the rest of the Axis crowd, then headed back to Nanking to set up shop.
Wang had barely settled into his 'capital' before his attention was directed to the journalists of the International Settlement, who had exposed him throughout the Allied and neutral world. Through the medium of his Central Daily News, Wang retaliated now by publicly designating seven foreign and eighty Chinese newspapermen who would be "deported" the moment his government "liberated" their sanctuary in Shanghai.
The foreigners' list contained a touch of comedy: the name of Hal P. Mills appeared on it. For Hal was a notorious playboy-correspondent for the (then) racy Variety magazine as well as the owner of a scandal weekly for which he personally, and proudly, did the keyhole peeping. What the amused readers probably did not know was that Hal was also nominal owner of a Chinese-language paper (which he was not able to read) that had been attacking Wang.
But this was the only comic aspect about what would become the notorious 'Nanking Death List.' Everyone really knew that Wang's enforcers were not immigration officers but hatchetmen, and that the euphemism "deportation" really meant "execution." A t the head of the list was the name J.B. Powell.
This development was too much for most of the intended victims. Four of the seven, including the same Randall Gould who had earlier been cited for bravery by Hollington Tong, decided Shanghai was now too hot for comfort. The Post and Mercury Gould had edited was turned over to die-hard Sitting Duck George Bruce, whose eventual fate was to "drop dead" immediately after an "interrogation" session with the Japanese Kempeitai.
But even after this exodus, J.B. still refused to leave Shanghai. Questioned much later about his motives, he said that he could not bring himself to abandon the Chinese staff that had been loyal to him over a twenty-year period. Those who knew him best were also quite sure that he wanted to finish the job he had begun, supporting China with on- the-spot news.
Finding they could not frighten J.B., the Japanese adopted a more direct approach. They ordered him killed in broad daylight, in public. While walking home from work one afternoon, he was struck on the shoulder by an old-fashioned German hand-grenade, with such force that it injured him: it did not explode. The weapon may have been defective or mishandled by the assailant, but the intent was simple murder.
This outrage only increased J.B.'s editorial attacks on the Japanese. He took on an armed bodyguard thereafter. But although there were still ships leaving Shanghai, he refused to budge. Instead, his magazine began calling the Japanese campaign a looting expedition; he could even cite the theft of his own car, which he was sure had ended up in some Japanese general's garage.
The Japanese answered by mobilizing all the publications they controlled, such as the morning daily Shanghai Times, slandering him with a thousand vicious and even obscene accusations. But if a hand-grenade attack could not silence him, then neither could name calling.
On Pearl Harbor Day, two drunken Japanese sailors crashed in the door of J.B.'s apartment at the American Club, threw him into the street, and then stole everything he possessed, including irreplaceable gifts that had been given to him by China's greatest men over the years.
For the moment, J.B. became a street refugee along with a million Chinese in Shanghai, driven from their homes by the Japanese, many to die of cold and hunger.
Before shelter became a real worry, J .B., fearful that he was being followed, cautiously made his way to the secret radio station at Hamilton House and, from there, totally confounded the Japanese by broadcasting to the world an un censored and accurate bulletin on the plundering of the International Settlement. This was several hours before the Japanese were able to make their own self-serving announcement.
The Japanese police traced J.B. to the Metropole Hotel, where he had taken refuge, and took him to a secret prison they had prepared within the fashionable Bridge House in Hongkew. But there was nothing fashionable about the room into which he was thrust. For the next five months he underwent hell.
In his memoirs, he was as scrupulous in detailing with his own misadventures as he had always been with the news, and he related that he had been beaten only once. But beatings were unnecessary; prisoners were tortured continuously by being forced at all times to sit on their bare feet on freezing concrete floors. And food was portioned out at starvation level, with no mercy shown to those who sickened and died.
J.B. was interrogated night and day about everything and everyone, but at no time did the Japanese inquisitors learn about the existence or function of the Sitting Ducks (some of them, who had left Shanghai before Pearl Harbor, were nevertheless in Japanese hands at other conquered places).
J.B. entered the Bridge House a healthy and vigorous middle-aged man. But after five months there he weighed no more than 30 kilos, and his feet were in such condition that both had to be amputated. The Japanese no doubt were planning to bury him when the time came, but an exchange of ambassadors and newspapermen was being arranged between the United States and Japan, and the U.S. government demanded that J.B. Powell be among those delivered to the gangway of the 'Conte Verde' before her departure on the first leg of the repatriation trip. Otherwise there would be no exchange.
The Japanese Army was violently in opposition. But the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo prevailed, and probably at the last possible minute for J.B.'s declining physical resistance, he was transferred to Shanghai Public Hospital, where foreign doctors and French nurses preserved his life.
But still the Japanese Army wouldn't give up. They wanted J.B. dead and, without his even knowing about it, convened a court martial; he was convicted of espionage and sentenced to be shot. But again the Japanese Army was overruled by the Foreign Ministry, and J.B. was carried on a stretcher to the mercy ship.
J.B. Powell arrived safely in the United States. He was admitted to New York's Harkness Pavilion Hospital, where he was still in treatment when Japan was forced into unconditional surrender. This must have given him great satisfaction, though he was not a vindictive man.
When his condition improved, he was asked to provide evidence for the Tokyo trials of Japanese war criminals. There he testified in defense of Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, whom J.B. and many other observers believed to be innocent.
J.B. Powell set down his memoirs in the hospital. The very last words he wrote, concluding his fascinating My Twenty-Five Years in China, were words of hope for this country:
" ...I often think of the China to which I came as a young man in 1917, and I realize more and more how far she has progressed since that time and how much her two great leaders, Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, have accomplished in little more than a generation. I am convinced that after this war is over, China, with the proper guidance and support, will once more forge ahead as a nation, and that her future will be one of importance to all the world. I hope to have some part in that future, as I have had in her past."
But he was not to have a part in that future. The ordeal at Japanese hands at Bridge House had broken his health beyond repair. Not long after expressing his final sentiments concerning China, for which he not only worked but suffered, he died quietly.