04 December 2007
“THE OLD WHANGPOO"
I'll meet you at the slop chute on the old Whangpoo
Bring along your dip net; there'll be enough for two
There'll be beans and carrots and some Irish stew
I'll meet you at the slop chute on the old Whangpoo!
- Anthem of the “River Rats” of the Yangtze River Patrol, sung to the tune of "Let Me Call You You Sweetheart"
I was disoriented last night, floating in and out of sleep as I watched the Patriots almost lose their first game of the season against the hapless Baltimore Ravens. A late phone call saved me from falling more deeply asleep in the Brown Chair.
I am slow out of the gate this morning, too, since I was going to try to explain the heavy significant of the District Planning decision by the Arlington County Board of Supervisors in 1980, and what it means to Big Pink. That was going to be a challenge to get my blood going, but I sighed, since it is a critical part of a boring story.
Then I saw the obit in the morning messages- a guy named Willard Sweetser passed away last Friday in the veteran's home in Gray, Maine. He is of note to the retired Spook community, and I decided to run it in the next issue of the newsletter that I edit.
He got a fair amount of ink, since he was 105 when he died last Friday, and had served Attaché tours in Moscow and Belgrade in the late 40s and early 50s.
He was also the Naval Academy's oldest living alumni, class of 1926, which is a big deal to those folks, That wasn't nearly as interesting to me as the fact that he was also the last living alumni of the Rape of Nanking, and certainly the sole surviving River Rat of the Yangtze.
Sweetser had been a deck officer, assigned to the Asiatic Fleet in the days before WWII, conducting a curious Brown Water mission.
The movie “The Sand Pebbles” tells the story of the gunboats that steamed the Yangtze River. Steve McQueen is brilliant as a disaffected sailor who watches the fictional USS San Pablo try to protect US interests amid the bitter fight between the Nationalist Chinese and the Communists. The Japanese appear really only as a metaphor, but it was much more than that.
The Navy periodically has to re-invent itself, depending on what the President wants them to do. Most of the time, the ships sail far away, protecting order and commerce on the high seas. The service was invented, after all, to stop the humiliation enforced on American merchants by the Muslim pirates of Tripoli.
The USS Constitution is the still-living reminder of the high-seas, blue-water mission of the original Navy. But it is important to remember that the point of the mighty ships is to bring power to the shore, or at least near it.
During the Civil War years, part of that mission remained; the Yankees fought the Confederates in distant waters. In 1864, USS Kearsarge fought it out with the Confederate commerce raider Alabama, commanded by the dashing Rafael Semmes in the blue waters off Cherbourg, to the amazement of the French.
But the war demanded another mission for the Navy, and that was the Anaconda-style blockade of the South, and the penetration of the great inland waters of the Mississippi. The Navy cut the Confederacy in half with low armored ships, heavily gunned, that ran the currents of the rivers down past Vicksburg.
That was the same sort of mission required in China. Ten years before the battle off Cherbourg, a decade before the struggle to end slavery, US Navy ships sailed up the Yangtze River to enforce treaty rights and protect American merchants. By the 1870s,expanding economic interests in China necessitated the creation of an “Asiatic Fleet” for protection of merchant ships against river pirates and warlords.
By the early 1900s, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was operating tankers on the river, and the Navy presence became more essential due to the disorder.
advanced to 1300 miles from the East China Sea.
USS Panay was one of five small, shoal-draft river gunboats that had been built specially for the China mission, customized not for the blue ocean, but for the brown placid waters of the Yangtze. Occasionally they took fire from guerrilla bands of Chinese on the shore, but Panay and LT Sweetser were about to collide with the expanding Empire of the Sun.
Seventy years ago, Japanese forces were approaching Nanking. It was late November of 1937. They were of a mind to punish the Nationalists, and if they could not kill Chiang Kai-shek's troops, they were willing to slaughter the civilians who lived there.
The Nationalist foreign office notified the American Embassy in Peiping that US citizens should be evacuated. The Ambassador and most of the personnel left next day in USS Luzon; the rest stuck it out for another week, when they decided to depart in Panay, and the Japanese were notified to that effect.
The anniversary of the response is next week, seventy years downstream from the massacre of 300,000 Chinese by Japanese forces. On the 11th of December, Panay embarked the American officials and a small number of other civilians, mostly journalists who were well equipped with cameras and film to record what came next. They started up river, escorting three Standard Oil barges in order to prevent their seizure by the Japanese.
Two British gunboats and a few other British craft followed in loose company. For two miles the little flotilla was fired upon by a shore battery commanded by Colonel Hashimoto, radical Imperial Army Officer. There is controversy to this day if he was personally determined to provoke a war with the United States. It seems unlikely, since the outrage that was about to come was purely a joint service evolution.
At 1100 on the 12th, Panay and the three tankers dropped the hook in the broad river and prepared for Sunday routine. American Flags were posted prominently on the awnings, and the guns were un-manned. The day was sunny and fair. Holy services were held, and a substantial mid-day dinner laid out in the wardroom and mess decks. Shortly after 1330, three Japanese Navy planes appeared in the sky, and commenced a bombing run on the anchored ship.
Panay's forward 3-inch gun was disabled, the bridge smashed and significant internal damage occurred. The air attack continued. A half hour later, the ship was sinking and LCDR J.J. Hughes, Panay's skipper, ordered "Abandon Ship."
Japanese planes strafed the two sampans that were used to get the survivors ashore; the Captain was severely wounded, and the XO took over until he too was hit. An Army officer named Roberts, the US military attaché, was designated the new Captain of the Panay survivors by LCDR Hughes from his litter. The Army officer assumed command of the survivors.
Roberts spoke fluent Mandarin, and he was the best possible choice, given the fact that the crew of the ship was about to become a shore command.
Japanese boats appeared as the boats made for shore, strafing the wreckage and briefly boarding the sinking Panay. Although it is not stated that way in the Navy history, Panay would thus have been briefly captured. The Japanese abandoned ship as well, and two hours after lunch had been served, Panay sighed, rolled over and went down.
Japanese soldiers searched the riverbank for survivors, but under Robert's command, Chinese ashore helped them avoid capture.
Two of the three Standard Oil barges were also bombed and destroyed. The Panay survivors were well treated by the Chinese, and word was eventually passed to the senior American officer on the Yangtze, Admiral Yarnell. USS Oahu and HMS Ladybird took the survivors onboard two days later.
Two American sailors and one civilian passenger had died of their wounds; eleven officers and men were seriously wounded. It was a minor sideshow to the slaughter that was visited on the people of Nanking, which some activists like to say killed more than the combined atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Panay incident caused quite a stir when the film of the attack was shown in the newsreels. It took a great deal of diplomacy to overcome the image of an American sailor manning his machine gun against the Japanese sans his pants.
The coming anniversary of the slaughter will be marked in China, though not here, and not Japan.
Willard Sweetser survived, of course, at least until last Friday. He had a distinguished career in the Pacific, commanding destroyers, and eventually a division of them.
he was the naval attaché in Moscow, when Uncle Joe Stalin was still around, and met Josef Braz Tito in Belgrade when he lived there.
But of all the times of his life, I would think that the most memorable might be those spent on the brown water of the Yangtze.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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