The Cold War (10 page)

At ten P
.
M. or a bit before on the hot and moonless night, better fortune intervened. A merchant ship, the
Kiang Ling Liberation,
suddenly appeared, heading down the half-mile-wide stream. Kerans whispered his orders. The sloop's engines were started—a huge blast of orange sparks from the funnel went unnoticed, to general pleased astonishment—and the little warship spun quickly into the river alongside the passing freighter. At the moment when the anchor chain appeared to be vertical, a quick blow from a hammer snapped a pin; a shackle opened and the anchor was slipped, with the silent, splashless plummet of an Olympic diver. Kerans accelerated and sailed in tandem with the
Liberation,
keeping to the merchantman's starboard side and thus hiding behind her bulk from the watchful gunners ashore.

The ruse worked, for a while. But near the town of Ta Chiang, both ships were challenged by a series of magnesium flares fired from a battery on the left bank, which hung high in the sky, illuminating the scene for hundreds of yards.
Heavy machine-gun fire broke out, and then the shore batteries began to pound, and shells and tracer bullets flew in all directions. The
Amethyst
was hit, forward of the bridge. There were no casualties; a few plates were buckled, and there was a small amount of flooding. She gunned her engines to the highest speed possible, determined to fly past the
Liberation
and get away from the battery at all costs. Observers on board say she scraped by the larger vessel with just eighteen inches to spare. Roaring downriver with a huge bow wave before her, she managed to get away almost unscathed. She sent a signal to Brind, noting laconically that she had been hit. It reached the admiral at a dinner party in Hong Kong, where a toast had been drunk at precisely ten P
.
M., as Kerans began his breakout: “To H.M.S.
Amethyst
and all who sail in her.”

More signals came in to headquarters during the night. “Halfway,” said one, as the
Amethyst
passed the midway point to the sea. “Hundred up,” said another (a cricketing term meaning “a hundred runs scored,” to which the admiral replied with the same sporting metaphor: “A magnificent century!”). A small passenger junk unexpectedly crossed the path of the fleeing and unlit ship. The bridge officers waited, sickened, for the awful crunch of smashed wood and the cries of the drowning. There was nothing they could do. Many may have died. But the
Amethyst
could not afford to stop.

The ship raced on, now straining at twenty-two knots, like a dog with a bone in its teeth. Mercifully, Kerans knew the river well enough, even at night, and managed with uncanny accuracy to avoid the sand spits and bars that might have brought the vessel to further grief.

At dawn they passed under the searchlights of Woosung Fort, where another Communist battery stood on the right bank, just where the Whangpoo entered the Yangtze. The searchlights briefly glanced off the hull—everyone on board holding their breath—and then the lights moved on. The
Amethyst
kept roaring onward. “Everything you've got!” Kerans instructed the engine room. “Damage to engines accepted.”

And then, finally, there in the dim light of morning, under a plume of smoke on the wide gray waters of the outer estuary, was the familiar outline of the

H.M.S.
Concord.
She saw the smaller
Amethyst
roaring down on her and made what has since become one of the Royal Navy's most famous signals:
Fancy Meeting You Again.
It was now beyond doubt that the H.M.S.
Amethyst
's saga was over. After 101 days in captivity, she had broken free—though at a terrible cost. All told, 46 men had died on the ship and on those that had attempted to
rescue her, and 93 more had been wounded. Even so, it was a moment of triumph for Britain, and one of the greatest, face-losing humiliations ever for the Chinese Communists.

But the Communists were determined not to see it in this light. “Do not make haste in celebrating the success,” they cautioned in an official statement released to the press. “The whole case will not be closed so long as the culprits are not punished.” Another statement warned: “As long as the British government still exists, the Chinese people must continue to go into the responsibility for the crime and insist on meting out severe punishment.”

In the West, such tocsins were widely dismissed as sour grapes. The H.M.S.
Amethyst
limped back to Hong Kong, then to Britain, doing a lap of honor through the eastern lands of the empire on her way home. Everywhere, church bells rang, celebration dinners were served, ladies swooned over the sailors, officers were handed medals, most were promoted—it was one of the very last of fading Britain's finest hours. The king congratulated everyone concerned, some personally at a reception in Buckingham Palace. The movie studio British Lion made a film—which everyone at my school was required to see—star-ring all of the gang (Richard Todd, William Hartnell, Donald Houston, Akim Tamiroff) who had recently brought the cinema-going public so breezily through World War II.

The film (black and white, of course, and with stirring music) was called
The Yangtse Incident.
In a story rendered simple and gripping were seeds rich in the pride of England, and of our sour contempt for the people of China. As a twelve-year-old—the film was released in 1956, seven years after the events on the river—I believed in it implicitly. It must have colored the thoughts of many who saw it and made them think of China, particularly Chinese Communists, with the utmost loathing and hostility.

There is something droll in considering what the Chinese did after the
Amethyst
made good its exit. It is said they sent down divers and located the an-chor—still attached to its several tons of chain—and pulled it from the river. They paraded it around town as a spoil of battle, a trophy that their men had wrested bravely from a fleeing imperial coward. How many of the locals accepted the story is anyone's guess, but it was not to be too much longer before the city of Chinkiang (Zhenjiang) had been swept clear of all its foreign residents, and the old British consulate had been turned into a revolutionary museum. It is said they dumped the relic there, in the gardens. The anchor, like
the consulate itself, was part of the dastardly enginework of foreign oppression that the revolution had so brilliantly driven away.

But to find the anchor today? A baffling habit I have encountered in many Chinese is their mute insistence that
they do not know where anything is.
You ask an ancient who has lived all of his long life in Zhenjiang, “Where is the old British consulate?” and he will shake his head and wave you away with his hand, professing no clue, having no interest. My questions about the anchor itself produced still more puzzled refusal: “No, never heard of it.
Purple Stone Hero
? Not anywhere here. Doesn't ring a bell with me.”

In the end, my interpreter and I found a man with a car who knew where the local museum was, and this turned out to be, unmistakably, the old consulate itself. No one knew it was; but its architecture—redbrick and of a complexity you find in an Escher painting, with seven linked buildings, lots of outside stairs and archways, and wings and extra windows—was classic Foreign Office Grade One issue. The building looked as though it might have been sent out from London in crates and set up on a spare weekend by the local staff. Consulates like this one existed all over the East, from Kashgar to Korea. They were built during that wave of British expansion and self-confidence that marked the latter half of the last century. Here the walls were still intact, ten feet tall; and I could make out bas-relief crests, with intertwined letters for “Victoria” and “Regina.”

It was just as well the walls were high: Britain had attacked the Manchus here as far back as 1842, and a keen, long-standing bitterness had suffused the local population. It was a bitterness that may well have contributed to the locals' professed ignorance of any British memorial even a century and a half later.

The invaders' triumph back then had been a signal one. Seven thousand British soldiers had stormed over the city's double walls from their flotilla of men-of-war—the
Amethyst
's predecessors, one might say. They had sacked the city within hours. The local governor had locked himself and his family into their house and set it ablaze, all dying on the pyre. From the British point of view, the rout of the city's defenders had been the culminating victory of the first Opium War. Within just one more month, the Chinese had been forced to hand over Hong Kong in perpetuity and pay $21 million in Mexican silver dollars, the currency of the day, in compensation. The Chinese, inevitably, saw it otherwise.

However, it took them many years to become strong enough to say so. Two
decades later, China was still being pummeled and humiliated by foreigners and was forced to allow Chinkiang to be declared a treaty port in 1861, effectively relinquishing sovereignty over parts of the city to foreign administrations. The foreigners had high hopes for the place. A British concession was built, with its own waterworks and generating station—and, as in Shanghai and Nanking and forty-five other places in China, its own British laws and courts.

Britain, Germany, France, and Austro-Hungary set up consulates in the city; great British trading firms like Jardines and Swires kept hulks in midriver for mooring their steamers; and Standard Oil of New York (which was later to become Mobil Oil, a company with formidably strong connections in old China) had a farm of oil storage tanks. Japan toppled most of this comfort and prosperity when it captured the city in 1937; Zhu De's troops—who stormed across the Yangtze in 1949 even while the
Amethyst
was enduring her miseries in mid-stream—managed to finish it off. Few outsiders have lived in Zhenjiang since. The only foreigners I heard about while I was there were a couple of Algerians said to be working in a talc factory.

It was one thing to find the consulate, quite another to find the anchor. No one outside the building would say anything about the delights inside until I paid to get in. So I handed over one yuan to a crone behind the guichet and inquired. No, she said, there is no such thing as an anchor anywhere here. The cadre standing inside the gate said much the same: There were plenty of Sung dynasty pots and pans, but no anchor from a barbarian war vessel. “You have wasted your time,” he said, and laughed bitterly.

Just then a young Chinese woman who worked at the museum came down the stairs. She had been reading a novel—the museum had few visitors—and was chewing on a sweet called sugared cow skin. She offered me one. She smiled warmly. “I heard there was an anchor here,” she said in halting English. “But it is buried in grass, I think. Besides, they are doing some demolish work. Come with me.”

My interpreter and I followed her up a hillock, through an archway, past a flight of stone steps that must have once seen processions of clerks and second secretaries and consuls. We came out onto a newly flattened area of wrecked brickwork, where one of the seven buildings had recently been flattened. Behind it was a small slope covered with jungle. The girl pointed to it. “There, I think. Use a knife, if you have one,” she cried, and went off, back to her novel and her bag of sugared cow skins.

Thick laurel bushes had infested the hillside, and the branches slashed at
my legs as I waded through to the edge of the cliff. And then, burdened by growth but unmistakably nautical, there was the anchor—four feet tall, its shank covered in some kind of cracked poultice, its ring solid, a half-shackle with a pin hanging loosely from it. The anchor's crown was firmly cemented to the ground, and the flukes rose sharp and spadelike into the surrounding bushes. It looked half a century old, but it had been built well, and it was neither rusty nor broken. The Admiralty commissioned its iron to last.

A small notice, half-illegible from dirt and growth, was mounted in front. I rubbed away the grime and read: “This was the anchor from the foreign Imperial War Vessel
Purple Stone Hero,
captured in the fourth month of 1949 by Heroic Members of the People's Liberation Army after the ship had made a cowardly run away down the Long River to the Sea.”

I cut away some of the plants and took pictures. I had known Sir Edward Youde when he was governor of Hong Kong. I had liked him and gone to his funeral. His widow was living in Britain; I thought she might like to have a reminder. The little ship herself had long since been retired and scrapped. This, thousands of miles away in China, under a canopy of laurel leaves, was all that was left.

Or was it? Since coming back and poring over the pictures, I have begun to wonder.

The anchor in Zhenjiang is a much smaller device than that normally used to hold a warship. Its design is that of a fisherman's anchor, made specifically to hold a little craft. It is most certainly not the standard Admiralty “pattern stockless anchor,” with which pictures show the
Amethyst
's bows to have been equipped. My guess is that the Chinese have actually duped us, and them-selves—not, one might say, for the first time. What stands among the undergrowth in Zhenjiang may well be another anchor, possibly from one of the
Amethyst
's lifeboats—thus perhaps indeed a British anchor, and so a symbol of the treachery. But my guess is that the real half-ton of iron, together with all its chains—that which was so silently slipped on the night of the getaway— remains buried in the Yangtze mud. It might have been a good idea to raise it, but it was in all likelihood far too heavy and far too sunk for even the bitterest Chinese to recover it and put it on show. A lesser substitute had to do.

JAMES CHACE AND CALEB CARR

It was four in the morning on June 25, 1950 (Korean time), when ten North Korean divisions led by tanks and supported by 1,643 guns crossed the 38th Parallel into an unsuspecting South Korea. In a rainy half-light, the Korean War began, “the first overt military assault,” the historian John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, “across an internationally recognized boundary since the end of World War II.” The North Koreans envisaged a blitzkrieg operation of a few weeks against an undermanned, undermechanized, and thoroughly underprepared enemy. The war would last just over three years and end in stalemate. What started as a war of movement and maneuver would evolve into a trench struggle worthy of 1916. In terms of battlefield violence, no other conflict of the Cold War would measure up to the Korean War.