The Cold War (8 page)

The sun rose in a cloudless sky of brilliant blue. We soon heard the familiar sound of approaching Corsair engines. We watched with great satisfaction as several of the beautiful gull-winged marine fighters flew back and forth and circled over us. The pilots waved and gave us the thumbs-up sign. The Corsairs provided a great boost to our morale, as well as an impressive show of force for any watching Communists. We no longer felt isolated.

I do not remember how many days we remained in Lang Fang before another patrol relieved us, but it was not long. During this time, we were ordered to remain in or near the compound—not that any of us had the least desire to go exploring. We played baseball in a field just outside the compound gate and stayed vigilant. Fortunately, everything was quiet, and we soon returned uneventfully to Peking.

The final G-2 report of the incident mentioned that four to five thousand Communists had attacked the village but that the marine patrol had not been molested. There was only a brief reference to the Japanese tanks, and none to the infantry with them. I have no idea whether the U.S. government really would have held the Japanese major responsible if any Americans had been injured in the skirmish. And I never learned who ordered the Japanese to send out a patrol with tanks to guard the railroad station.

The incident at Lang Fang became a bland paragraph in a routine report. But to the marine combat veterans involved, this close call was an unforgettable experience, not so much for what happened but for what could have happened to a small group of fugitives from the law of averages. The wheel of fortune had spun once more—and again we had survived.

SIMON WINCHESTER

How drastically military momentum can change in just three and a half years. In the fall of 1945, when Eugene Sledge had his encounter with the sullen detachment of Communist troops, the Nationalists held a distinct advantage. Against the advice of American military advisers, Chiang sent his best armies north into Manchuria. They took the most important cities, but the Communists held the countryside and threatened rail connections. For Chiang, it was a strategic trap from which he would never escape.

The Communists, close to defeat in the early months of 1946, would regroup; as time went on and their armies grew, the initiative in the civil war would pass to them. They began to sever the supply links to the armies holding the Manchurian cities: Trapped, the Nationalists had no choice but to surrender. The Communists then pushed southward, taking advantage of Nationalist demoralization and inept generalship. Still, the Nationalists began 1948 with a three-to-one superiority; by the end of the year, the Communist forces outnumbered them. Many of their troops were former Nationalists; even generals went over to their side. They captured vast stockpiles of American arms, left behind by the fleeing Nationalists. Now they had material superiority, too. But Mao was convinced that the Americans were preparing to mount an invasion, leading him to announce a “lean to one side” doctrine. That side was, of course, the U.S.S.R. The Iron Curtain now extended to Asia.

In the spring of 1949, as the blockade of Berlin was fizzling to an end, Chiang's Nationalist armies were close to collapse. If the Soviets in the West had suffered a reverse that checked their expansionist hopes in Europe, in the East the armies of Mao's People's Republic were on the
verge of achieving Communism's most resounding (and most enduring) victory. They occupied the greater part of China north of the Yangtze, and on April 20 would begin to cross the divided nation's greatest river. That was the same day that the British frigate
Amethyst
came under fire from Communist guns as it made its way up the Yangtze. Its mission was to bring supplies to the British embassy in Nanking, the Nationalist capital that Chiang's government was already abandoning. The Communists would occupy it, unopposed, on April 24, by which time a badly damaged
Amethyst
had crawled to the relative safety of a protective island. The frigate would spend the next 101 days there, trapped and a virtual captive of the Communists. During that interval, which lasted into midsummer, Chiang would flee to Taiwan and the Reds would take China's largest city, Shanghai.

What followed all depends on your point of view. For the West, and Great Britain especially, the
Amethyst
's dash for freedom was the stuff of legend—and, inevitably, a movie. Was it indeed one of the rare epics of the burgeoning Cold War? But as Simon Winchester learned when he visited the site, the Chinese regard the escape of “The Imperial Make-Trouble Vessel” as a tale of bloodied bullies slinking away, a humiliation for the British Empire in particular and white prestige in general. For over a century, the Royal Navy had roamed the major rivers of China unchallenged. Suddenly, it seemed a little less invincible. The psychological impact of the
Amethyst
incident (as Chassin writes) “did more for a Communist victory than any strategic maneuver could possibly have done.”

SIMON WINCHESTER has published eighteen books, including
Their Noble Lordships, Prison Diary: Argentina, The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, Krakatoa,
and
The Meaning of Everything
. His next book is
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
. This article is adapted from Winchester's account of a journey up the Yangtze,
The River at the Heart of the World
. When not traveling, he can be found in New York City, on a farm in the Berkshires, or on the Scottish island of Luing.

Z
HENJIANG, A MODERATELY SIZED
and moderately ugly city that lies on the still-tidal waters of the Yangtze, a hundred miles inland from the river's mouth, has long been famous in China for the making of vinegar. Westerners with a taste for literature may also know it as the childhood home of a formidable lady named Pearl Sydenstricker, who, after her marriage, became Pearl S. Buck, Nobel laureate. But I had long known of the place for a quite different reason. There was supposed to be a relic in Zhenjiang—from 1949, back when it was known as Chinkiang—that would stir the heart of any English schoolboy of my generation: the anchor of the famous and heroic Royal Navy vessel H.M.S.
Amethyst.
I had come to Zhenjiang because I wanted to see it.

So I told my translator what I wanted and suggested she might ask where the anchor was to be found. She translated the vessel's name to herself—“
Ame-thyst,
how to say?”—and then suddenly snorted (for weeks she had been ribbing me about the British empire) with mock annoyance.

“I know the ship. Of course!” she said. “We call it the ‘Imperial Make-Trouble Vessel.’ What is the name?
Purple Stone Hero,
yes, that's it! We defeated it. All Chinese know the story. You came as pirates, and we made you run! You were forced to leave a part of your precious ship behind, here in Zhenjiang. You destroyed a junk with passengers on your way out. Killed many people. We will find the piece you left behind. The anchor. It was a great humiliation for your
precious
British empire.”

I reeled slightly from this unexpected onslaught. The facts—or at least the facts as presented to us as schoolchildren—had cast the whole affair for me in a very different light.

His Majesty's Ship
Amethyst
was a sloop-cum-frigate, built in 1943, the eighth to bear her name in the Royal Navy's history. She was of 1,495 tons displacement,
three hundred feet long, thirty-eight feet across, and had been built on the Clyde by Alexander Stephen & Sons. She had the typical arms for a ship of the
Black Swan
class: six 4-inch guns, two Bofors guns, and twin Oerlikons. She normally carried 170 officers and men.

She had had a perfectly respectable career in her two World War II years, sinking a submarine off Ireland, helping take the Japanese surrender in New Guinea. Come the peace and she was sent to the Pacific, and in 1949 she found herself attached to the 3rd Frigate Flotilla, an instrument of British imperial power that patrolled the seas in the rough triangle bounded by the western tip of Sumatra, Cape York in northern Australia, and the most northerly point of the Japanese island of Hokkaido. This was half a century ago, when Britain still kept a presence in the Far East: London felt there was much to do in the way of showing the flag and intelligence-gathering, and that gunboat diplomacy—with a fleet of cruisers, destroyers, frigates like the
Amethyst,
and gunboats themselves—was still the best way to accomplish this. (The phrase “gunboat diplomacy” was in fact specially coined about a century ago for patrols on the Yangtze.) In the case of China, a British naval presence on the Yangtze also enhanced the security of the British embassy in the country's capital, Nanking, three hundred miles upriver from the East China Sea.

At the time of this celebrated incident, the unfolding of which gripped half the world and all of my school, a number of Western nations—notably Britain, the United States, France, even Italy—had been allowed to patrol the Yangtze as if it were their own for nearly a hundred years. A slew of treaties had been imposed on China after the so-called Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, giving these foreign countries certain rights on the river. They were allowed to patrol it with guns locked and loaded, for the purposes of protecting their own trade, their own interests, and their own citizens.

By today's standards, it was a bizarre arrangement—as outlandish and unimaginable as, say, letting Japanese warships patrol today's Mississippi to protect a Honda plant in Hannibal, Missouri, or allowing Chinese gunboats to sidle among the punts on the Isis to look out for the interests of Beijing students up at Oxford University. But in the nineteenth century, the Chinese were powerless to prevent such arrogance by foreign traders. It was an arrangement that had gone hand in hand with the similarly bizarre concept of extraterritoriality—by which foreign citizens in the “concession areas” of certain Chinese ports could be judged only by their own courts and not be subject to Chinese law.

The two concepts—foreign naval rights on Chinese rivers and the jurisdiction
of foreign courts on Chinese land—came together in Nanking in the late 1940s. Here were a British embassy and a British community in the capital of a China that was rapidly falling apart. The Yangtze, in the spring of that year (and as so often before in Chinese history), was the fault line: To the north of it was the People's Liberation Army of the Communists; on the south bank, the broken armies of the Nationalists. Caught in the middle were the neutrals— the embassies and foreign traders in Nanking, and the gunboats on the Yangtze itself. The former needed protection, if not evacuation, and these were tasks that could be accomplished only by the latter.

In March 1949 the Foreign Office in London sensed that Nanking was in dire trouble. The British ambassador there, Sir Ralph Stevenson, was nervous. As early as November 1948, he had asked Admiral Sir Patrick Brind, the commander in chief of the Far East station in Hong Kong, if he could spare a guard ship, a small fighting vessel that could bring the essential supplies that had been delayed by the civil war. It would help raise the morale of the local foreign community, and it could assist in a possible evacuation. Brind had agreed, and in March 1949 he sent a destroyer, H.M.S.
Consort.
Now, in April, the embassy needed another.

At first the plan called for an Australian vessel to be sent, but at the last moment, the admirals decided to bring the
Amethyst
up from her antibandit patrols off the coast of Malaya and dispatch her instead. She was to relieve her larger and more powerful colleague, the
Consort,
which had been stationed at Nanking for the previous several weeks and needed revictualing.

The
Amethyst
was in many ways the ideal choice. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander B. M. Skinner, had made the trip before. He had some knowledge of the ever shifting sandbars, and of the places where the so-called chowchow water could twist a small ship in half. On April 12 the small vessel set off from Hong Kong and entered the Yangtze by the Woosung Bar light on April

15. Four days later, on April 19, she began working up the river proper and passed the end of the estuary at Chiangyin. She stayed there overnight, her lights doused. She had steam up again at dawn, and at five A
.
M. on Wednesday, April 20, she was under way once more, into the mouth of the dragon. Everyone knew of the risks: General Zhu De's People's Liberation Army was on the left bank (as seen looking downstream), and Mao Tse-tung was warning publicly that his military leaders planned to lead their men across the great river at any moment. The
Amethyst,
entering so dangerous a scene, was about to make
for herself a secure place in naval history, an immutable myth in the minds of a generation of British children, and a heroic role in motion pictures.

As the ship approached the section of the river where the Communists were known to be massing, Commander Skinner ordered precautions: Large Union Jacks were to be draped over the ship's sides. The guns were to be armed and readied. The speed was increased from the customary Yangtze cruising speed of nine knots to the “danger” speed of sixteen. The ship was officially a neutral and should not have attracted any hostile fire. But this was China, a country in a dangerously unpredictable mood.

As the
Amethyst
passed Low Island, near the end of a long north-south reach in the river, there was a sudden crackle of rifle fire from the shore. Skinner ordered his gunners to train and aim. Then the rifle fire was followed, more ominously, by the zoom and whine of shells, as a shore battery opened up. Huge splashes of water erupted off the starboard beam. More than a dozen rounds were fired. None hit the British ship. On the bridge, the officers made caustic remarks about Communist marksmanship. As the
Amethyst
rounded the bend and began to head due west along the river's muddy, duck-filled Kou-An Reach, the final leg on the way to Chinkiang, the order was piped: “Hands relax action stations.” The danger, it was thought, was over.