The Cold War (9 page)

The sun was rising into a cloudless midmorning sky as the ship drew abreast of Rose Island. She was at reduced speed, and her guns were trained fore and aft. No one aboard suspected a thing—when suddenly, without warning, without any cries or flags or bugle blasts, a shell flashed across the ship's topmast. Skinner ordered his crew to action stations once more and demanded speed. The telegraphs clanged urgently, and the motors began to roar. And then, in an instant, the Communists found their aim. At least three shells slammed into the ship and exploded: One hit the wheelhouse, turning it into a maelstrom of splintered steel and wood and severely injuring the coxswain. As he fell, he pulled the wheel—and the ship—hard over to port.

The wounded vessel was now racing directly toward the thick mud of Rose Island. Skinner ordered
hard a-starboard,
trying desperately to correct the course and prevent his ship from running aground. At the same time, he ordered his guns to open fire. But almost at that instant, two more shells hit the ship. The bridge detonated in a ball of fire, and everyone in or near it was killed or terribly wounded. Skinner was mortally injured and would live on for two agonizing days. The ship's executive officer, Lieutenant Geoffrey L. Weston, was hit by a piece of shrapnel the size of a matchbox. It tore through his lungs
and lodged in his liver. It was this man, though bleeding heavily and barely able to speak, who took command.

Weston had to watch in impotent horror as the ship slid steadily into the mudflats and then stopped dead, stuck fast, right in the gun sights of the Communist batteries. He managed to croak one urgent flash signal to the commander in chief of the Far East station in Hong Kong: “Under heavy fire. Am aground in approx. position about 31 degrees 10 minutes North 119 degrees 60 minutes East. Large number of casualties.”

Zhu De's gunners showed no mercy. Shell after shell tore into the ship, and within minutes the deck was an inferno, littered with dead and wounded men. The ship's power was cut, the radio was out, the sick bay suffered a direct hit, and the aft gun turret was ruined. The injured lay untended among the flames, and if not burned by the fires, they were hit by splinters from new shell bursts. For over an hour, the ship shuddered and shook under the barrage. Weston gave the order to evacuate—though not abandon—the vessel.

A small steaming party was left on board to keep the boilers ready, as well as medics and volunteers stayed to help tend the wounded. The rest swam or took life rafts to Rose Island or to shore—under a withering hail of machine-gun fire, which killed more of the terrified men as they swam. Those who made it set themselves up in the underbrush, watched, and waited. (By the end of the action, twenty-two of the 183 men aboard the
Amethyst
were dead, thirty-one were wounded, and one was never found.) The plan was to reboard the ship at nightfall, repair her, refloat her, and get away. The Communists stopped shelling about eleven A
.
M., and the river fell quiet. Everyone thought that a boarding party might come; one never did.

Why the Communists never captured the
Amethyst
or its sailors remains an abiding mystery of the saga. Prevailing wisdom has it that Zhu De saw the ship as a potent and valuable symbol. (Men were just pawns; ships were instruments of imperial aggression.) And perhaps in his eyes, a crippled British ship, its crew at his mercy, was a far more powerful symbol than that same ship firmly in Communist hands. The Communists appeared to regard the ship rather as a cat might a captured mouse: something to torment and torture but not to kill, not for now.

The valor of the British sailors—or whatever I imagined about them, in the jingoistic reveries of my world as a five-year-old—was seemingly without precedent or parallel. The ship's crew was briefly reinvigorated at the prospect of
rescue, or as Shakespeare might have said, rebuckled and respurred. For, as anticipated, the H.M.S.
Consort
came in an attempt to help, speeding downriver from Nanking at an almost unimaginable speed of twenty-nine knots, flying seven ensigns and three Union Jacks. But the rescue was never to be: The
Consort
was caught in brutal shellfire, too. Ten of her men were killed, and she found it impossible to stop and help, her captain knowing full well that if she did so, she would be trapped as well.

The destroyer had no choice, savage though the leaving had to be, other than to blink a farewell to her crippled colleague and limp on toward the sea to lick her own wounds. The
London
and the
Black Swan
ventured upriver from Shanghai, but they also lost men in unacceptable numbers and turned back. A Sunderland flying boat made two attempts to land beside the stricken ship but was chased away by gunfire—to which a seaplane was naturally even more vulnerable, being thin-skinned and designed both to fly and to float. The
Amethyst,
as the whole world knew, was trapped and very much on her own.

And so she remained, a tiny gray warship held hostage to a mighty revolution's fortune, a symbol of the unfamiliar new realities of what was being called and understood as the Cold War. She was refloated, and for the first few days, she steamed about wildly, trying to find sanctuary beyond the reach of the guns, which, thankfully, for the moment, were silent. She landed all her wounded onto the relative safety of the Nationalist-held right bank, into the care of local doctors, and she would later send her dead to the bottom of the river, weighted with 4-inch shells. She dropped anchor off Ta Sha Island (“Big Sand Island”) a few miles downstream from Chinkiang and just opposite the point where the Grand Canal, the world's most venerable artificial waterway, joins the Yangtze.

There, in five fathoms of water on a good holding ground of mud and sand, the
Amethyst
stayed put. The hostage drama that captivated half the world was to go on, miserably, for an extraordinary 101 days. There was to be no more firing, but there was no freedom, either.

The politicians in London fulminated impotently, and everywhere diplomats tried in vain to engage Washington and other influential capitals in an effort to do something, to use such muscle as they had to win the ship's release. All came to naught, and it was swiftly realized that only those on the spot had any chance of ameliorating the situation. The assistant naval attaché from the British embassy in Nanking, Lieutenant Commander John Kerans, eventually reached the
Amethyst
by land and took command of the vessel. He was later to

become the principal hero of the saga. A young third secretary at the embassy named Edward Youde, who spoke Chinese impeccably (though with a Welsh accent, it was later joked), walked and bicycled to the Communist lines and tried to reason with the senior cadres of the local leadership, to no avail. (Youde went on to become governor of Hong Kong and, sadly, the only holder of that office to die in harness, in 1986.)

Locals in sampans were allowed to come to the ship's side and sell food, paltry amounts of poor stuff for high prices. The ship's oil supplies dwindled away, both from leakage through buckled plates and because of the demand for light and power. The crew's morale dropped. Rats infested the vessel; some were larger than Simon, the ship's cat. The ship's dog, Peggy, was frightened of them and hid. The temperature rose and rose.

“Things are beginning to get mighty uncomfortable,” wrote the ship's only surviving radio officer in his diary on July 22. “And I'm afraid that if our oil gets much lower we shall be shutting down again for 48 hours at a time; then it won't be uncomfortable anymore, it will be plain Hell. Even to write this I have got four sheets of blotting paper under my wrist, and it is soaked through now…. Itis beginning to get really grim.”

There was terrible tedium aboard, and above all a persistent and nagging concern that the firing might begin again or that the Communists might order all the men into a concentration camp. No one—in London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nanking, or on board the
Amethyst
—had any clear idea of what to do. The only plan officially bruited was to scuttle the ship; Kerans had brought dynamite and knew the location of all the sea cocks (valves that could be used to flood the hull). The survivors would then try to route-march back to the security of Nationalist-held areas or the free areas of Shanghai.

But by the middle of July, another idea was forming, quite independently, in the minds of both Lieutenant Commander Kerans and, unknown to him, Sir Patrick Brind down south in Hong Kong. Sir Patrick thought it might be possible for the ship to break out, secretly, and make a run for it. He began to send hints to the ship's commander—they could not be in code, as all the bridge codebooks had been destroyed—suggesting that plans for escape might be considered. London was officially eager for a diplomatic end to the situation and wanted no derring-do or risky maritime drama, but Admiral Brind, like Nelson at the battle of Copenhagen, had a penchant for turning a blind eye to official policy.

His hints, however, passed unnoticed, not just by the ever listening Chinese
but by everyone aboard the
Amethyst.
They were, it has to be said, decidedly opaque. “The golden rule of
making an offing
and taking
plenty of sea-room
applies particularly” was one sentence, supposedly pregnant with meaning, transmitted by Brind. He sent it in the course of telling the ship's crew how best to weather an oncoming typhoon. It took two full weeks for Kerans to kick himself, realizing the old sailor had been offering much more than mere advice on seamanship. He was telling the commander, without letting the Chinese know, that he ought to
make an offing
—leave the shore—and give himself
plenty of sea-room—
get far out to sea. In other words: Break out, Mr. Kerans, and in short order.

Even before Kerans had deciphered the obscure hints from Brind, he had realized that escape was the only choice. Such negotiations as were occasionally going on between local British diplomats and the Communists were getting nowhere. Fuel oil was approaching the point at which he could not make the downstream journey even if he wanted to. Water, fresh food, morale—all were low. The men would soon have to go on quarter rations (they had been on half rations since July 11). And at the end of July, there would be a new moon. If there was any moment when it might be possible to slip past the watchful eyes of the Communist sentries, that would be it.

There were plenty of disadvantages. The ship, scarred and holed—the more serious holes plugged with blankets—was in poor shape. Only one of the big guns could be fired. The charts had been covered with blood or shredded, and no one aboard had much idea about how to navigate down one of the world's most complicated and always changing rivers. The engine room had lost seventeen of its men, almost half the complement. Even if the engines themselves held up during the high-speed run for cover, would the crew?

However, a decision had to be made. Kerans wrote a cable, using a code devised over the previous three months and having to do with the spelling of names of the nearest relatives of various crew members. He gave it to the signalman and marked it with the highest of all priorities
—Flash:

This last essentially instructed the H.M.S.
Concord,
a destroyer stationed near the mouth of the Yangtze, to act as
Amethyst
's floating guardian angel and
to listen in on a preassigned radio frequency as the captive ship's progress unfolded.

The plans were made meticulously. If the
Amethyst
were to pass out undetected, silence was imperative. The anchor could not be raised in the normal way; rattling the chain through the hawsepipe would make a din certain to awaken every Communist battery from Chinkiang to the outskirts of Shanghai. Instead, it was decided to knock the pin from one of the half-shackles that held together the lengths of anchor chain, and to let the chain fall into the water vertically, with thick grease on all the ship's surfaces that it might touch. The ship's perceived shape was important, too: A silhouette could be recognized. So mattresses and awnings and hammocks were arranged along the ship's sides to make her look as different as possible from usual. She reconfigured her lights, showing green over red, masquerading as a civilian vessel, a merchantman. Talking above a whisper was forbidden; smoking was banned; no one could use the intercom, certainly not the radio.

Two hours before the deadline, and with impeccably poor timing, one of the supply sampans arrived alongside. The crew members were Chinese, of course, probably part-time spies for the Communists. So the hammocks and the awnings had to be struck, and the sailors had to show their mood of customary weariness. No clue was to be offered the next day. The visitors said they had beer. They were told to come back with it the next day. Everything was made to sound normal.