of material on this subject continued to pique my interest to such an extent that shortly after my retirement from the U.S. Coast Guard, I decided to return to university. My goal was to earn a PhD in history and write my dissertation on the U.S. military in China from 1901 to 1937. I chose this period to show the military’s actions between World Wars I and II and the armed forces’ views of China and the Chinese at a time when various political forces were attempting to remake the country. These actions and the military’s take on China and the Chinese at the time are part and parcel of McKenna’s The Sand Pebbles. When I finished my dissertation, I had a great appreciation for McKenna’s novel and wanted to know more about the author, who had otherwise been reduced to just a few bibliographical lines on the book’s jacket.
Like his novel, Richard McKenna had fired my curiosity, and I decided to write a biography of the man. I chose to tell his life’s story mainly because little is known about the enlisted forces of the U.S. military. So little is known because enlisted men and women—especially those serving before World War II—rarely wrote diaries or left collections of correspondence. Years after he had retired from the Navy, Richard McKenna wrote that his shipmates in his first ship, Gold Star (AK 12), seldom wrote or received letters. McKenna, with his long service in a still little-known region of the world and his obvious writing ability, seemed the perfect subject to help illuminate the world of enlisted people in the Navy.
The second reason for my interest in McKenna was personal: McKenna’s life in many ways paralleled my life. McKenna had retired from the enlisted force of a naval service, as had I. He had attended university using the World War II GI Bill; I used the Vietnam War GI Bill to attend Purdue University. He had decided near the end of his service years to become a writer of fiction, whereas near the end of my active duty, I began work in nonfiction. Lastly, McKenna had won first place in an annual writing contest in Proceedings; I placed in Honorable Mention.
With the goal of researching the life of a career enlisted sailor to shed more light on the enlisted personnel of the naval forces, I began looking for material on the author of The Sand Pebbles. I quickly came up against the classic obstacle responsible for the blanks in military history regarding enlisted personnel: McKenna seemed not to have left any papers. I examined the archival collections at the Naval Historical Center, now known as the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC), and found nothing that could be considered a major primary source—diaries, manuscript collections, and letters—and support a biography. At the start of my research, my progress came to a halt. I decided the biography could not be accomplished, so I moved on to other projects in maritime history. Nevertheless, when I visited Washington, D.C., in pursuit of other subjects, I continued to check the collections of the NHHC for material on McKenna, to no avail. Finally, after a detailed literature search, I found a handful of secondary material on the Navy in China and McKenna, including Professor Robert Shenk’s introduction to the 1984 reprint of The Sand Pebbles in the Naval Institute Press’ Classics of Naval Literature series and a few books that had gathered McKenna’s speeches and short stories. These few sources allowed me enough information to write a short article on McKenna that was published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in 2002. Thinking this would be my last effort in telling McKenna’s story, I then returned to researching and writing about maritime history, but I continued to check the NHHC’s holdings during my many research trips to Washington, D.C.
Shortly after my article was published, I received an e-mail from a Mountain Home, Idaho, librarian, asking if she could reprint the article; she wanted to show the residents of Mountain Home something about a local author. I directed her to the editor of Proceedings, who gave her permission to use the article and also sent her copies of the Naval Institute’s 1984 edition of The Sand Pebbles. I returned to other projects. It wasn’t long after this, however, that I received a letter from José Madarieta, an English teacher at the Richard McKenna Charter High School in Mountain Home. José told me he had established a museum and collection dedicated to Richard McKenna in the school’s library, and he invited me to visit. The invitation came just as I was finishing a project that had taken me to Ketchum, Idaho. The route home from Ketchum took me near Mountain Home, and I agreed to stop at the school.
During my visit to the Richard McKenna Charter High School, I learned how Madarieta had come to establish the museum and collection. He had been instrumental in having the charter high school named after Richard McKenna, and in the process of naming the school, he had made contact with the sister of McKenna’s deceased widow. The sister told José she had boxes of material concerning McKenna stored in a shed behind her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Madarieta received a grant to travel to North Carolina to examine the boxes, and he returned with two hundred pounds of papers. Not only did José undertake the difficult task of organizing the collection; he also conducted interviews with the people who had known McKenna during his childhood and adolescence in Mountain Home and sought out any possible source dealing with Richard McKenna.
The collection as organized by José contains material on McKenna’s high school years, drafts and copies of typed speeches, articles and typed drafts of The Sand Pebbles, and a novel in progress at the time of his death. In the correspondence section, there are letters written to McKenna after the success of The Sand Pebbles from his classmates at Mountain Home and one teacher he respected at the College of Idaho, along with Richard’s responses to many of these letters. With two exceptions, the largest part of the correspondence section contains letters McKenna received from former shipmates and readers after the publication of his novel. Many of these correspondents were Navy people and shipmates, but others are businessmen, missionaries, and the sons and daughters of missionaries and businessmen who all had had experience in China. McKenna responded to many of these letters and in some cases had extended discussions about China. The two exceptions, as may be expected, are letters to and from McKenna’s agent, Rogers Terrill, and the editor of The Sand Pebbles, Marion S. Wyeth Jr., at Harper & Row. In short, when I surveyed the McKenna Collection at the Richard McKenna Charter High School, I knew I had seen the largest collection of primary material on Richard McKenna in the United States. It was enough material to begin work on the biography I had always wanted to write.
With the Richard McKenna Collection in hand, I next tried to obtain another vital collection: McKenna’s Navy service record. Federal privacy laws forbid those other than immediate family members from viewing a service record for at least seventy-five years after the service member’s death. With all of McKenna’s immediate family deceased, I contacted my U.S. representative, Derek Kilmer (D-Washington), in an attempt to obtain the record. Thanks to work undertaken by Nicholas Jay Carr, a member of the congressman’s staff, and Congressman Kilmer’s letter on my behalf, I received a full copy of McKenna’s service record. The service record, like the McKenna Collection, was pivotal in writing this biography.
Robert A. Caro, author of a magnificent multivolume work on President Lyndon B. Johnson, has spoken of the value of place in a person’s life. James L. Haley, author of Wolf: The Lives of Jack London (2010), writes of the importance of “research around [Haley’s emphasis] the subject.” I followed this excellent advice in observing Richard McKenna’s life. For example, McKenna spent at least seventeen years at sea, and for him, ships were home (“place”); therefore, an overview of the ships he served in and their importance in his life are essential in his biography. McKenna’s service in China is also important; thus, I have provided an overview of the China Station to satisfy Haley’s “research around” requirement. I also discuss the turmoil in China during McKenna’s tour of duty in the Middle Kingdom, especially when he served in a river gunboat in the late 1930s and just before 7 December 1941. At this time several wars were ongoing in China: the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party and Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party and the Sino-Japanese War between both Chinese parties and the Japanese. The Sino-Japanese War began in 1937 and morphed into World War II, but the Chinese in fact seemed to spend more time fighting each other. An overview of these conflicts occurring around McKenna is important here.
In the years before, during, and after McKenna’s time in the Middle Kingdom, Mandarin
