Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus

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