A voice from his left. He kept his head down and bit hard to stop his tears. “Too fucking hot for ya? Then sleep on the deck, man; it’s the only way to do it.”
He looked around now. He could hear again. He heard the man’s voice and a bigger sound. Something was roaring outside of him. Huge, louder, fast, shuddering. It was the water, the water and the ship; the ship was cutting through water. He was at sea.
I placed small ads in the Marine Corps Gazette and Leatherneck. The ad said that I was trying to locate Marines who served in China between 1937 and 1940. I gave my home address, phone number, and email address in hopes there might be someone who could help me learn more about the United States Marines in China. I expected to hear from family members who had a father’s scrapbook or maybe had an uncle’s letters. I was unprepared for what happened.
The first ad appeared in September of 2000, and I began to be drawn into the China Marine world immediately. I came home from work that day, and my message machine flashed, showing I had seven messages. That was a lot for our house, so I grabbed a pen to jot down numbers, but when I heard the first message I couldn’t write at all.
A firm male voice said, “Ms. Cameron, this is Staff Sergeant Clifford Wells. I am responding to your notice in the Marine Corps Gazette. I believe I can assist you. I served in China 1938 and departed Shanghai on 23 March 1940. Please call me.”
He relayed his phone number—I was sure this person was saluting as he spoke—and then he said, “Now I usually bowl on Monday and Wednesday, so it’s best to call me on Friday.”
I knew no matter how young he had been in 1938, this was a really old guy who sounded like he was still Staff Sergeant Wells.
That week I had more messages like that, delivered in the clipped tones of radio bulletins. And I received letters, which echoed the phone calls: “Dear Ms. Cameron, I am writing in response to your recent notice in the Marine Corps Gazette. I believe that I may be able to help you. I am . . .” Then they gave rank, name, duty assignment, and location in China, which always included the full date of arrival and departure.
The letters described each Marine’s assignments, duties, and special services rendered: chauffeur to the commander, chef for enlisted men, engineer, or corpsman. Somewhere near the end of each letter the writer would tell me his current age—eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine—and how best to contact him. The closings were poignant: “I am happy to help you learn more, but please don’t call. I am extremely deaf.” Or “I will write back to you again but only when my son comes on Thursday to help me with the mail.”
But there was another face of former Marines: emails. The ghosts of China came to me through the Internet. The emails were slightly less formal: “Hi Diane. Rcvd yur email msg. My tour of duty in Shanghai was 3 Nov. 1938 thru 18 May 1940. Fourth Marines regimental Hdqtrs. I was C.W. radio operator. I have some phone books of Shanghai . . .”
And with each new contact, I received a writer’s gift: Each man had documents. Some had scrapbooks or copies of the Walla Walla, a weekly newspaper first published by the Marines in Shanghai in 1928. Some men had saved the 1938 Thanksgiving dinner programs that included the menu, and others had box scores of Chinese baseball games with the rosters of players. And they wanted to send it all to me.
Cliff Wells, Frenchy Dupont, and George Howe, along with other former Marines, became my friends and teachers. Despite their age and ailments, they were generous with their time. George, who served with Donald and was now eighty-seven years old, was completely deaf but still wrote to me every week.
These men told me what it was like to be young and far from home, see death all around them, and then have to kill. These men, older than the Greatest Generation, shared that group’s reluctance to talk to family about what they’d experienced, but they were willing, almost waiting, to tell me. It was Cliff who asked me one day, “Diane, do you understand what ‘hand-to-hand combat’ really means?”
I hesitated, knowing in that moment my notion of combat—based on movies—was about to change. And then Cliff told me in gruesome detail.
Frenchy explained what starvation felt like and described his panic and fear when, as a prisoner of the Japanese, he realized he was going blind. And a man nicknamed Bones—because he weighed sixty-three pounds as a prisoner of war (POW)—told me about the strain of being surrounded by violence every day. And it was George who described seeing a guy “go off his rocker” when I asked what it was like to handle dead bodies every day.
It did make me wonder, as it has since my journey began, Why has no one uncovered this group of men who could write the real “We Were There” story of events leading up to World War II? From the urgency I felt from these strangers, pushing to get these materials into my hands, there weren’t many people in their lives—not at their own Thanksgiving dinners or at the bowling alley—who were willing to listen. Here were the men who saw the Rape of Nanking and the bombing of the USS Panay, who lived the high life of Shanghai—“Paris of the Orient”—and the lowest of lows as prisoners in Bataan and Palawan, and survived. These men, who had been through all of that and still identified themselves first and always as United States Marines, wanted to tell their stories.
I am aware of the ease with which the phrase “China Marine” rolls from my tongue now. The stories led to facts, and the giant puzzle started to fill in. I know Donald and the Marines were transported on the USS Chaumont, “up north” means Tientsin, and “guard duty” means confronting the Japanese. I know “bombing detail” means picking up body parts all day and that we were at war with Japan long before Pearl Harbor.
America tried to avoid war with Japan in those years, but war pressed closer. There had been American business interests in China for thirty years; Standard Oil had a large operation there, as did a dozen other American companies. The International Settlement was a kind of neutral zone, and there was an American embassy in Peiping (later called Peking, then Beijing). The American businesses had thousands of employees in Shanghai, Nanking, and the surrounding area. In the 1930s Japan began to push against the Chinese, and the Americans and other foreign nationals were in the middle but trying, ever so delicately, to stay neutral.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was basically pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese but struggled to restrain the Japanese without actually fighting. But the Japanese pushed hard against the Americans, which led to the delicate duty of the United States China Marines who had no orders to intervene; they were only to protect Americans and American business interests. However, in 1937 their diplomatic position became more tenuous. In December of that year, Japanese aircraft bombed the USS Panay, an American gunboat sitting in harbor. It was a hostile gauntlet thrown down by the Japanese, but President Roosevelt, unprepared for war, accepted Japan’s explanation that the daytime bombing was an accident. Instead of military retribution the United States asked Japan for monetary compensation, but the China Marines knew that war had moved closer and their lives were going to get worse.
“I remember when the Panay was bombed,” Cliff told me. “We were alerted that morning, and we locked and loaded; we’d always drilled and had emergency drills; you couldn’t see all those bodies everywhere and not know this was a war. We were on alert; we heard the Panay went down and were ready to march into the Japs. We were on our way to confront them with arms but then got word to step down. Washington said, ‘It was an accident.’ But nobody in China thought it was an accident. It was the middle of the day, and the Panay was flying her colors. They shot at our ship, and we just sat there.”
Donald’s discharge papers say that he “participated in the defense
