12. On the Eve of the War
In September 1939, a major war broke out in Europe again due to the German invasion of Poland. Britain, France and other countries began emergency mobilization. Our Far East unit was also in turmoil, and many people planned to return to homeland to fight. Due to the rapid expansion of the army, orders for promotion and assignment of officers were issued one after another. I originally thought that I would also be transferred back to China. Unexpectedly, at the end of September, I received a telegram that I was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and would still be stationed in Shanghai as a naval intelligence officer, responsible for the aftermath if the concessions were occupied. That day happened to be my birthday.
(Figure 4-12-1) Lieutenant Commander Paul Draaken works late into the night in the communications room on the gunboat "HMS Peterel".
My colleagues started being transferred away one after another from the end of the year, and there were fewer and fewer people in the unit. However, the surrounding environment became more and more dangerous, and many tasks were already in a state of semi-suspension. Even so, I still focused my attention on the most important task of declassifying the secret telegrams between the Japanese Navy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I had less and less time, but due to the confidentiality of the work, I also had to set aside time to brush up on my Japanese so that I could personally examine these highly classified telegrams.
We worked on the gunboat "HMS Peterel" until late every night. I was responsible for reviewing the results of the cipher machine translation and making preliminary analyses. If there was important intelligence, I would personally take it ashore and hand it over to the team leader or the consul general. Sometimes I even had to personally deliver it to the Hong Kong headquarters for Japanese experts like Major Charles Boxer to interpret.
The "Deep Purple" was too important to us; we couldn't let the Japanese know we possessed this powerful weapon. So, after loading it onto the gunboat "HMS Peterel", we asked a colleague skilled in explosives to install a self-destruct device and built a chute leading directly to the boiler room to immediately destroy the codebook. However, due to inexperience, we used too much explosive, which ultimately sank the "HMS Peterel" as well.
As 1940 approached, in June we heard the news in Shanghai that France had been occupied by the German army, and we even saw newsreels of German troops marching in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The French people in the concession area were all dejected, facing an uncertain tomorrow, because the German-backed Vichy puppet government might allow the Japanese to gain more control over the French Concession in Shanghai, which would also affect the security of the International Settlement.
Worse still, in July 1941, Japan reached an agreement with the Vichy government to deploy more than 200 warplanes to Vietnam, plunging Burma and southern China into a highly tense situation. However, the Chinese resistance government in Chungking and the French Vichy regime maintained diplomatic relations until the liberation of Paris in 1944, when they turned to de Gaulle. This complex relationship was an anomaly in World War II.
The news of the fall of Paris made me very worried about my girlfriend, Noor, who was in Paris. I hadn't heard from her for quite some time. It wasn't until the end of 1940 that I learned her family had escaped Paris and arrived in England. In her letter, she mentioned that she planned to join the Special Operations Service (SOE), which might allow her to become my colleague. I was shocked. How could someone so absent-minded be a secret agent? I immediately wrote back to stop her, but I never heard from her again. I wasn't sure if it was due to secrecy, which made me very anxious.
(Figure 4-12-2) Paul Draken personally brought the classified information to the Hong Kong headquarters and handed it over to Major Boxer, a Japanese expert, for translation.
Every day, bad news came from the European battlefield. After the fall of France, the British troops on the continent abandoned all their heavy equipment and fled back to the island. Now the English Channel had become the front line. Since July, news of massive German bombing raids on London had arrived. I was extremely worried about my family and longed to return home to fight like my colleagues. I heard that the Royal Air Force was currently facing a severe shortage of pilots, even accepting mercenaries from other countries. I, on the other hand, was a genuine Royal Navy pilot, a member of the aerobatic team. Now that my country was in peril, I was stuck on the isolated island of Shanghai, unable to contribute. How could I not be filled with anxiety!
I applied to my superiors several times to volunteer for a transfer back to Britain to serve as a fighter pilot, but my team leader just shook his head and said, "Your staying in Shanghai is a direct order from the higher-ups; it's impossible for you to be transferred back to England." After the war, I heard that this higher-up was Mr. M. What was that old fox up to?
At the same time, I received a coded telegram from London, warning us to refuse any contact between Japanese dissidents and British intelligence. I was completely baffled by this telegram; I didn't know of any Japanese person who could be turned. It wasn't until after the war that we learned that shortly after the war began in September 1939, the MI6 station chief in the Netherlands had been lured by the Nazi intelligence chief to the Dutch-German border to meet with officers of a so-called anti-Hitler group. It turned out to be a trap set by German intelligence. Our men were forcibly abducted by German troops as soon as they arrived, and the entire Dutch intelligence organization collapsed overnight. The Germans even went so far as to claim in the media that British agents had orchestrated the Beer Hall assassination attempt on Hitler.
Many of my colleagues spent the war in German concentration camps, only surviving after the war. Thankfully, I never considered it, otherwise I might have ended up on the gallows like Sorge.
We all believe that the development of the European campaign will tempt Japan to take advantage of the chaos in the Far East, but we don't know when or how. To make matters worse, the United States is adding fuel to the fire at this critical juncture by imposing an embargo on strategic materials such as oil and iron to Japan. The two sides have held several negotiations in Washington, D.C., but they have all ended in disagreement. If this issue is not resolved, Japan is very likely to march into Southeast Asia in order to obtain precious oil, which would seriously threaten the interests of our British Empire.
Every night, we stared intently at the Japanese Foreign Ministry's coded telegrams translated by "Deep Purple," terrified of seeing instructions like "begin burning documents," which would signify the imminent outbreak of full-scale war and the inevitable end for the "HMS Peterel". In fact, by the end of 1941, only the"HMS Peterel" remained in Shanghai among the British Yangtze River gunboats, with three others stranded in Chungking on the upper reaches of the Yangtze (these three ships were all donated to the Nationalist government in March of the following year); the rest of the large warships had sailed to Singapore. The US Navy also had only one river gunboat remaining in Shanghai, the "USS Wake". Now, the Whampoo River was filled with Japanese warships; if war broke out, we would be trapped like turtles in a jar, none of us able to escape.
(Figure 4-12-3) After the "Ninghai" and "Pinghai" were blown up by the Japanese in Kiangyin, they sailed under their own power through the Bund to the Kiangnan Shipyard for repairs.' The two ships, "Ninghai" and "Pinghai," were built by the Harima Shipyard in Japan, and by the Jiangnan Shipyard, which provided the blueprints and materials from Japan. Both ships were sunk by Japanese aircraft when the Sino-Japanese War broke out a few years after they entered service. The Japanese immediately salvaged them and sent them to Japan for repairs, contrary to rumors that they were to be handed over to the Wang Jingwei regime to build a navy. This makes one wonder whether Japan had already planned to take them back and keep them for its own use when it received money from the Chinese to build the two ships. 
(Figure 4-12-4) After being renovated by the Japanese in 1944, "Ninghai" was renamed "Ioshima" and "Pinghai" was renamed " Yasoshima", and they were recommissioned by the Japanese Navy. I was briefly serving at the Tokyo Allied Headquarters when I saw this telegram and was in charge of the investigation. Due to the fact that the ships had changed hands and names several times, most of the original data had been lost. This task was not easy, and no one else would have been able to do it. Fortunately, I had personally visited these ships before the war and had even traveled to Japan on the ship "Ninghai" to attend Admiral Togo's funeral, so I had a deep impression of them. After several investigations, I finally found out that "Ninghai" and "Pinghai" had sunk, and the ship "Yatsen" had been renamed "Adoda" and was serving as a auxiliary ship at the diving school.
(Figure 4-12-5) After being salvaged by the Japanese, "Yatsen" was sent to the Etajima Diving School to be used as a auxiliary ship.
The process of identifying the "Adoda" was the most unique, because her appearance differed from the historical photos. She had an extra sterncastle, and her original six-inch main guns had been removed. Therefore, no one had previously recognized her as the "Yatsen." Among the pile of photos, I thought she was the most likely candidate, so I rushed to the berth to identify her. When I first saw her appearance, I was quite confident, but when I boarded the ship and entered the officers' quarters, I was stunned. Before me was teakwood decoration and antique furniture, which was like being on a luxury cruise ship. This contradicted my memory, because on the day the "Yatsen" was sunk, I was negotiating with Commander Chen Tsiliang in this very office, and it didn't look like this then! Later, I heard from an old Japanese sergeant present that the decorations were actually taken from the decommissioned armored cruiser "Yakumo" and that the ship was indeed the "Yatsen."
After I helped the Chinese government locate the "Yatsen", I immediately reported it. Ultimately, Allied headquarters decided to return the "Yatsen" to China, and it sailed from Kure back to Shanghai in August 1946 to rejoin its fleet. The Chinese side was disappointed that it could not recover the "Ninghai" and "Pinghai" cruisers, but it was still somewhat satisfactory that the "Yatsen" warship named after Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, was recovered! The "Yatsen" was almost captured by the Communist army in Nanking in the spring of 1949. Later, it broke through the encirclement and came to Taiwan, and was decommissioned in the 1960s. I even saw her in Keelung Harbor. Her two large smokestacks were emitting thick black smoke, which made the ships moored next to her very dislike her.
There will be another opportunity to recount my story at the Allied Headquarters in Tokyo after the war; for now, let's return to 1940. In the summer of 1940, we learned from "Deep Purple" that the Japanese Navy had acquired new fighter planes in the Chinese theater. Then, at the end of September, news came from Chungking that the Chinese Air Force had suffered a crushing defeat in its battles against the Japanese. By the end of the year, the Chinese had lost nearly a hundred aircraft, forcing them to withdraw all their remaining planes to preserve their strength, leaving the skies over Chungking undefended.
This reminded me of a group of Japanese military aircraft I saw at the end of July flying at high speed over the Yangtze River estuary. Their short, rounded noses indicated air-cooled radial engines, and their sleek, elongated fuselages and wings, retractable landing gear, and glass-enclosed cockpits gave them a nimble and agile appearance. Each wing extended a dark, menacing gun barrel that looked like a machine gun of at least 20mm caliber. Soon after, we heard a terrifying new term from "Deep Purple": "Zero fighter"!
(Figure 4-12-6) The incident in 1939 in which in Siberia fur store ambushed Ting Mocun, the head of "No.76".
As war broke out in Europe, the situation in Shanghai, the isolated island, became increasingly chaotic. Japanese and Chinese puppet regime intelligence agencies, such as "No. 76, Jisifeier Road", frequently infiltrated and created unrest. Furthermore, many former high-ranking Chinese government officials who had defected to the Japanese—commonly known as "traitors"—liked to reside in the concessions or frequent them for pleasure. Assassins sent by Chungking specifically targeted these locations for assassinations. Whenever such incidents occurred, "No. 76" would confront the concession authorities, accusing the police of inadequate security and suggesting they send reinforcements. The concession authorities, of course, refused, but the repeated incidents became unbearable. Because of my past influence within Chinese society, which was somewhat well-known within the concession authorities (mainly due to the influence of Annie's godfather, Huang Kinrong), they sometimes requested that the intelligence group send me to assist them.
Shortly before Christmas 1939, an incident occurred in which Chungking agents ambushed Ting Mocun, the head of "No. 76," at the Siberian Fur Shop on Jing'an Temple Road. We expected that the other party would come to clamor against the concession authorities again, but after waiting for many days, there was no movement. Through our connections, we found out that a woman named Zheng Pingru accompanied him to the store to buy a fur coat. As soon as Ding entered the store, he realized that something was wrong. He threw down his banknotes and rushed back to his armored car. The Chongqing assassins chased after him and fired several shots, but Ding Mocun had already driven away.
Unable to catch the Chongqing assassin, the police investigated Cheng Ping-ju first, discovering she was the daughter of the chief prosecutor of the High Court of the International Settlement, a high-society figure the police couldn't touch. Cheng Ping-ju was a stunning beauty of mixed Chinese and Japanese descent, who, for some reason, became involved with Ting Mocun, the head of the "76th" secret service. I remember her because she was the cover girl of the Shanghai Liangyou Pictorial in July 1937, the month the Sino-Japanese War broke out! At the time, Liangyou Pictorial was printed by Shao Sinmay's printing company. Shao secretly gave me a copy of that photograph, saying it was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen; unfortunately, the photograph was lost during the war.
(Figure 4-12-7) Cheng Ping-ju, who was executed for her involvement in the Ting Mocun sniping incident, was once a cover girl for the Shanghai Liangyou Pictorial.
The assassination attempt on Ting Mocun was left unresolved. Later, in Chungking, I met a pilot surnamed Wang who claimed to be Cheng Ping-ju's fiancé. He and Cheng's brother were both fighter pilots in the Nationalist Air Force. He told me that Cheng Ping-ju was actually a spy for the Chungking Central Bureau of Statistics, responsible for luring Ting Mocun to a fur shop so that an assassin could punish a traitor. However, she was exposed by the cunning Ting and escaped the assassination attempt.
Ting, captivated by Cheng's beauty and concerned for his reputation, was unwilling to escalate the situation. This was why No. 76 had never confronted the foreign concessions. However, Ting's political enemies seized upon this as leverage, ultimately leading to Cheng Ping-ju's tragic death the following year at the hands of No. 76's agents. Cheng's fiancé, surnamed Wang, and her brother also died in the air battle. The lives of young men and women in that era were scattered like fallen flowers, a truly lamentable situation.
In the spring of 1941, another major incident occurred. One Sunday afternoon, She Aizhen, the wife of Wu Sibao, the top assassin of "76," crossed the border by car to a beauty salon opposite the Paramount Ballroom near Jing'an Temple. During a checkpoint inspection, a conflict erupted when her bodyguards refused to hand over their pistols, resulting in a gunfight. The police, She Aizhen's bodyguard, and driver were all killed instantly, and several others were injured. She Aizhen miraculously survived the hail of bullets. Upon hearing the news, 76 immediately dispatched two trucks equipped with machine guns to the border post to confront the police. Tensions were high and a full-blown confrontation was imminent.
(Figure 4-12-8) The shooting incident involving She Aizhen.
When I arrived at the scene after being notified, I saw She Aizhen, who had just been dragged out of a car riddled with bullet holes. Although she was a bit disheveled, she was indeed a famous woman in Shanghai. Her looks, figure, knowledge, and conversation were all top-notch, leaving a deep impression on me. Soon after, a member of the Japanese military police came to mediate and take her back, and both sides temporarily ceased hostilities. However, later, assassinations of police officers continued to occur in the concession, clearly the "No. 76" was retaliating. The authorities asked me to go and give them advice; it was truly a thorny situation.
I consulted my godfather, Huang Kinrong, but he refused to agree to the Japanese demands to become a "traitor" and kept claiming illness, so he couldn't mediate. At this point, I was at a loss. Finally, the Shanghai Municipal Council agreed to all the conditions proposed by No. 76, including allowing spies to bring guns into the concessions. Thus, the independent police power of the Shanghai International Settlement came to an end. In fact, even if we hadn't yielded this time, the outcome would have been the same when World War II broke out and the Japanese army entered the concessions at the end of that year. As for the British police officer who led the team that day, we had already hinted to him to sneak back to his country to avoid trouble!
Later, Wu Sibao was assassinated by the Japanese in 1942. She Aizhen then went to be with Hu Lancheng, the deputy head of the propaganda department of the puppet regime. However, Hu Lancheng secretly married the renowned female writer Zhang Ailing. After the war, when the Nationalist government hunted down "traitors," Hu Lancheng abandoned Chiang Eileen and fled to Hong Kong and Japan. He ultimately chose to spend his remaining years in Japan with She Aizhen, demonstrating her allure. Westerners might not find this story particularly compelling, but these individuals were all prominent figures in Chinese society!
 
(Figure 4-12-9) Eileen Chang was not only a writer, but also appeared in her early years as a socialite dressed in outlandish clothes. (Figure 4-12-10) Eddington House, 192 Hart Road, where Eileen Chang once lived. Eileen Chang was indeed somewhat involved in the two assassination attempts mentioned above. Besides the fact that She Aizhen later became involved with Hu Lancheng, Chang also wrote a novel related to the "Siberian Fur Shop Assassination Case." Many people believe that Chang heard these stories from Hu Lancheng, given that Hu worked for the Wang Kingwei government at the time and it's normal for him to relay gossip about Ting Mocun to Chang. I believe this is unlikely, or if it were true, it would be largely indirect and hearsay, as Hu was not a core figure in the Wang government. In the 1950s, Chang combined Cheng Ping-ju's identity with her own experiences at the University of Hong Kong to write the English short story *The Spyring*. This novel was never published, but Chang showed me the manuscript and sought my opinion, as it was the story I told her in Hong Kong. I have no opinion on her work because, from an espionage perspective, the story is too illogical. Who would need to sacrifice their virtue and sleep with the enemy to gain information about their movements? This is far-fetched and disrespectful to Cheng Ping-ju. Although Cheng did get very close to Ting at the time, there is no evidence that the two slept together.
(Figure 4-12-11) The British cruiser "HMS Liverpool" intercepted the Japanese cruise ship "Asama Maru" in waters near Japan and kidnapped the sailors of the former German cruise ship "SS Columbus". On January 21, 1940, the Japanese luxury liner "Asama Maru", en route from San Francisco to Yokohama, was intercepted and boarded by the British light cruiser "HMS Liverpool" in international waters off Nojimazaki Island, Chiba Prefecture, 35.5 nautical miles from the Boso Peninsula. The British targeted 21 former German sailors from the "SS Columbus", whom they believed were returning home to fight in the war, and forcibly took them away. In 1939, the "SS Columbus" was operating in the Caribbean Sea. On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany, and the "SS Columbus" was ordered to return home. The Royal Navy came to capture it, and the United States, which was then a neutral country, sent a fleet to stop it. The two sides confronted each other at sea. In the end, the "SS Columbus" chose to scuttle itself, and all passengers and crew were taken back to New York by the "USS Tuscaloosa", a heavy cruiser of the United States Navy. Most of them were detained until after the war before returning home, but some sailors took the railroad across the American continent to San Francisco and boarded the Nippon Yusen Kaisha's "Asama Maru" to cross the Pacific Ocean, hoping to reach Talian and then return home to fight on the Trans-Siberian Railway. However, they were intercepted and taken away by the Royal Navy in the waters near the Japanese mainland. The Japanese considered it a great humiliation that their ship was forcibly intercepted and its crew abducted by British warships right on their own doorstep. Naval high command clamored for warship escort, and the blockade of the Tiantsin concessions was also part of the retaliation. Finally, on February 19th, the British government released the nine men who had never served in the military. These men returned to Germany and joined the German Navy. One of them served in the submarine force; his U-boat sailed to Southeast Asia to support Japan. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, all the crew members were imprisoned in Japanese concentration camps in Indonesia. I paid special attention to this clue because after the war, I saw records in top-secret Japanese archives of this submarine carrying gold in Southeast Asia, which triggered a series of events in my search for Japanese-leftover gold in the Philippines. At the time, with war raging in Europe, Britain was preoccupied with its own interests and unable to attend to the East. Relative to the Japanese Empire, Britain was significantly weaker in the Far East and should have adopted a policy of strategic restraint to avoid conflict. However, the "Asama Maru Incident" was a complete shock. The Royal Navy deliberately provoked Japan on its doorstep, encroaching on Japanese merchant ships considered floating territory, causing the Japanese government to lose face. While this was undoubtedly a continuation of Nelson's fine tradition of "fight every enemy encountered," the relationship between Britain and Japan was not at war at the time. Was this action truly in the national interest? The cost was high, and the consequences were shared by all. Anti-British sentiment was ignited throughout Japan, making war inevitable. This incident also contributed to the atrocities committed by the Japanese army against British prisoners of war during World War II. The German sailors' determination to return home to fight, circumnavigating half the globe, is also admirable. This seems to be a German tradition, exemplified by pilots like Gunther Plüschow who flew from Tsingtao during World War I, and the legendary cruiser "SMS Emden". It's important to remember that most of the route and sea area was under British control at the time; to overcome these obstacles and return to their homeland despite the near-death experience requires unwavering resolve.
Less than a few weeks after Emily Hahn gave birth, World War II broke out. While I was arranging for intelligence officers to evacuate by torpedo boat in Hong Kong, Boxer refused to leave because he couldn't bear to leave Emily Hahn behind. After the Japanese occupied Hong Kong, Boxer was imprisoned in a concentration camp, while Emily Hahn with her infant child, endured hardship outside the camp until she was repatriated to the United States in 1943. In 1945, after Japan's defeat and surrender, Boxer was released from the concentration camp and immediately announced his marriage to Hahn. Boxer later became a history professor at a university, while Hahn continued her writing career. Their marriage was full of romantic legend, but Boxer's special status caused suffering for Shao Sinmay. After the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, Shao Sinmay's relationship with Emily Hahn implicated the British agent Boxer. Unable to provide a clear explanation, Shao Sinmay was arrested and ultimately tortured to death in prison.
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