were concessions—business districts—operated by the French and the Japanese.
“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” the wartime song asks. Shanghai was Paris on steroids, and the Marines were young and green. I can picture the nightclubs, shows, and rustling silks; the jewelry, necklaces, beads, and women all for sale. I can hear the ice tinkling in glasses and the music: Chinese musicians on the streets and jazz and classical music coming from the clubs at all hours. When I try to look through Donald’s twenty-two-year-old eyes, I wonder at all he saw.
China duty had the reputation of being the envy of the military services in those few years before World War II. It was considered light duty—Monday through Friday 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.—and the excellent exchange rate meant young men with low salaries could gamble and party, buying all the booze, silk, Chinese goods, and women they wanted. Back at the barracks a houseboy was spit-shining their shoes and tidying the bunks to dime-spinning Marine standards.
But there was a dark side to this life. For those who know what happened there in 1937 and 1938, “International Settlement” was also code for horrors beyond belief.
Over the years, photos of the torture and killing have been published and exhibited. In 1994 The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang described what the Japanese did to Chinese civilians. The atrocities were concentrated in Nanking but spread through all of occupied China and into the domain of the Marines. More than 300,000 Chinese civilians were murdered. But it was worse than murder; first they were tortured and mutilated, then killed.
In the 1930s there were bubblegum cards sold in the United States that showed pictures of the more discreet scenes of dead and decapitated bodies in China. This was, of course, our own anti-Japanese propaganda, but the pictures were a small sample of the atrocities Iris Chang would later uncover from photos and eyewitness accounts—men, women, and children brutally raped, tortured, and coldly used for bayonet practice. Chinese civilians were chopped, slashed, cut, and pulled to pieces.
One of the most sadistic games of Japanese soldiers was capturing pregnant Chinese women, placing bets on the gender of the fetus, and then cutting open the woman’s abdomen to determine a winner. The fetus would be pulled from the woman’s belly, tossed in the air, and caught on a Japanese soldier’s bayonet. The mother would be left to bleed to death. Sometimes the Japanese soldiers might cut off a woman’s hands or feet and insert them in her genitals. And our China Marines stood as witnesses.
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