Never Leave Your Dead. Diane Cameron

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 of the International Settlement, Shanghai, China.” It sounds romantic. And it certainly was international. The International Settlement was a rich, extravagant, highly scented, and scenic place. People from at least twenty different countries lived there, including British, French, Dutch, and American civilians, and there were concessions—business districts—operated by the French and the Japanese.

      “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” the wartime song asks. Shanghai was Paris on steroids, and the Marines were young and green. I can picture the nightclubs, shows, and rustling silks; the jewelry, necklaces, beads, and women all for sale. I can hear the ice tinkling in glasses and the music: Chinese musicians on the streets and jazz and classical music coming from the clubs at all hours. When I try to look through Donald’s twenty-two-year-old eyes, I wonder at all he saw.

      China duty had the reputation of being the envy of the military services in those few years before World War II. It was considered light duty—Monday through Friday 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.—and the excellent exchange rate meant young men with low salaries could gamble and party, buying all the booze, silk, Chinese goods, and women they wanted. Back at the barracks a houseboy was spit-shining their shoes and tidying the bunks to dime-spinning Marine standards.

      But there was a dark side to this life. For those who know what happened there in 1937 and 1938, “International Settlement” was also code for horrors beyond belief.

      Over the years, photos of the torture and killing have been published and exhibited. In 1994 The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang described what the Japanese did to Chinese civilians. The atrocities were concentrated in Nanking but spread through all of occupied China and into the domain of the Marines. More than 300,000 Chinese civilians were murdered. But it was worse than murder; first they were tortured and mutilated, then killed.

      In the 1930s there were bubblegum cards sold in the United States that showed pictures of the more discreet scenes of dead and decapitated bodies in China. This was, of course, our own anti-Japanese propaganda, but the pictures were a small sample of the atrocities Iris Chang would later uncover from photos and eyewitness accounts—men, women, and children brutally raped, tortured, and coldly used for bayonet practice. Chinese civilians were chopped, slashed, cut, and pulled to pieces.

      One of the most sadistic games of Japanese soldiers was capturing pregnant Chinese women, placing bets on the gender of the fetus, and then cutting open the woman’s abdomen to determine a winner. The fetus would be pulled from the woman’s belly, tossed in the air, and caught on a Japanese soldier’s bayonet. The mother would be left to bleed to death. Sometimes the Japanese soldiers might cut off a woman’s hands or feet and insert them in her genitals. And our China Marines stood as witnesses.