Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus
less with the decadence of the city than with the desperation of its citizens. Through Aunt Muriel, one of the great networkers of her time, he established contact with the Manchester Guardian. The paper had given generous coverage to Miss Lester’s campaigns for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and to her friendship with Gandhi. At the time it had no regular correspondent in China. The editor, William Crozier, agreed to take the unknown and inexperienced Hogg on trial as a non-staff correspondent.
This was an extraordinary coup. The Manchester Guardian had achieved national and international recognition under the editorship of C.P. Scott, who held the post for fifty-seven years from 1872. In those days every correspondent, however junior and remote from the Manchester office, was made aware of Scott’s famous dictum which appeared in an article he wrote to celebrate the centenary of the paper in 1921: ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred…The voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard.’
As Hogg was to discover, the then editor took this principle very seriously. The Manchester Guardian was a high-minded paper whose leaders inclined towards moral posturing. The paper had long refused to provide coverage of horse-racing, on the grounds that it encouraged gambling. But it insisted on giving a fair hearing even to its political enemies, and Mr Crozier made that point in a letter to his new China correspondent early on in Hogg’s career with the paper.
After writing a first piece in February 1938 for his new employers about the frenzied daily struggle for existence in Shanghai – which the paper did not print – Hogg found little to do. The city was packed not only with refugees but also with missionaries who, he observed, ‘were only too willing to do anything that had to be done’. There was starvation in the Chinese quarter and death on the streets of the international settlement, but the restaurants and cabarets remained open. There was plenty of good food and entertainment for those with money. Hogg had just received a cheque from home for the large sum of £10, and was well able to afford good restaurants. ‘Chinese meals are absolutely enormous!’ he wrote home, unconscious of any irony. ‘Dish after dish comes in and the idea is to take a little of each. This has great effect in preventing indigestion but is rather unsatisfactory otherwise – I prefer a good tuck in on a few things.’
Thanks to the Millicans and a visit to the imposing British embassy, where he was received by the lowliest of third secretaries, Hogg began to understand the complex sequence of events that had led to the destruction of much of Shanghai. He, like his missionary hosts and other members of the foreign press corps, was also hearing reports that tens of thousands of civilians were being slaughtered on the streets of Nanjing – reports that the expatriate population in Shanghai simply did not believe at first.
The Sino–Japanese war, which was to cost an estimated fifteen million Chinese lives and to last eight years, began on 7 July 1937. Under the terms of a treaty imposed on China in 1901, the Boxer Protocol, Japan had stationed troops in north China between the port of Tientsin and Beijing. That night Japanese forces claimed to have been fired on by Chinese troops, and stormed a local garrison in search of a missing soldier. The history of Japanese aggression towards China leaves little doubt that this was deliberate provocation. Within days the two nations were at war, formalising a conflict that had been intensifying since Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931.
On 7 August the leader of China’s nationalist government, Chiang Kai-shek, and his top advisers announced a national war of resistance. Chiang then took a military gamble that has been debated ever since. He decided to shift the major battleground of the war from north China to Shanghai.
The thinking was that while Japanese mechanised forces, backed by air power, would be undefeatable on the plains of north China, the restricted area of China’s major sea port would nullify their superiority in armour. Equally, Chiang reckoned that an attack on the Japanese settlement in Shanghai – one of several autonomous zones granted to foreign powers – would force Japan to switch forces from the north, relieving pressure on the Chinese army there.
Making a stand in Shanghai had the added advantage of rallying public opinion behind a government embroiled in a civil war with communist guerrillas. Above all, Chiang Kai-shek thought that any battle for Shanghai, under the eyes of the large foreign community, would draw the attention, sympathy and possibly the intervention of the Western powers. What Chiang and his commanders had overlooked was the sheer ferocity of the Japanese response. This was to lead to huge civilian and military casualties, culminating in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the capital Nanjing.
On 11 August Chiang moved three of his best German-trained and -armed divisions inside the limits of Greater Shanghai, although outside the areas of foreign concession. The Japanese were caught by surprise, and rushed reinforcements into their sector. The fighting between the two sides began on 13 August.
The use of heavy weaponry and air power took a terrible toll on both armies, and on the civilian population of Shanghai. In three months of fighting the majority of the nationalist army troops, the nucleus of Chiang’s modern army, were killed or wounded. Japanese casualties were over forty thousand. Thousands of civilians were killed. Large portions of the city outside the Western concessions were destroyed. Beaten and disorganised, the Chinese forces fell back towards Nanjing, the nationalist capital.
The Tokyo government offered to settle what it called ‘the China incident’ by negotiation, setting out a series of demands which in effect amounted to Chinese recognition of Japanese control over large areas of northern China. When Chiang Kai-shek did not deign to respond, the government in Tokyo announced that it would ‘annihilate’ the Chinese government. The true meaning of that announcement became clear within days at Nanjing, the Chinese capital, which the government had hastily evacuated as the Japanese advanced. The city fell on 12–13 December 1937, and what followed was one of the most shameful chapters in the history of twentieth-century warfare.
The ‘Rape of Nanjing’, as it became known, to this day clouds relations between Beijing and Tokyo. Despite the diplomatic blandishments and the economic and strategic imperatives that bind the two nations in a close regional relationship there is no mistaking the deep and enduring Chinese anger at Japan’s refusal to explain or apologise for what happened in Nanjing. In seven weeks of savagery Japanese troops, under the clear control of their commanders, indulged in an orgy of rape and killing. The slaughter was carried out with unimaginable brutality. Thousands were buried or burnt alive. An international tribunal later estimated that more than 260,000 non-combatants had been killed – more than four times the number of British civilians killed during the entire Second World War.
A number of foreigners in the city, including two American correspondents, Tillman Durdin of the New York Times and Art Steele of the Chicago Daily News, witnessed the senseless slaughter. And it was senseless. There was no military reason for exacting revenge on Nanjing. Indeed, some of the inhabitants had actually welcomed the Japanese as a means of ending weeks of fighting. Nor was the wave of terror and slaughter inflicted upon a civilian population the arbitrary behaviour of drunken troops. Day after day, week after week, for almost two months, Japanese soldiers committed mass murder and mass rape with methods, and on a scale, that defy description and logic.
The Chinese decision to defend the city was also incomprehensible. Nationalist commanders first torched all the villages and suburbs around Nanjing, then ordered their troops, with no means of resupply or escape, to make a stand in the walled city. Thus fifty thousand Chinese troops were surrounded and trapped by an enemy that could bombard them at will from the air, from the river and from ground batteries. According to Tillman Durdin, about two-thirds of the defenders were executed by the Japanese after the city had fallen. Young men were hunted down, stripped of their shirts, and those found with the tell-tale strap marks indicating military webbing were shot out of hand.
Durdin, who escaped Nanjing on an American ship moored on the Yangtse on 22 December 1937, filed a graphic series of reports. In summing up what he had seen, he set the tone for much of the
international reaction to the Japanese atrocities: ‘The wholesale execution of prisoners, the slaughter, rape and looting by the Japanese after their occupation