His best-selling novel was set in the decade before, but Richard McKenna's later gunboat experience nonetheless qualified him to write about Navy life on the Yangtze River. Here, in "Far Yangtze Station," artist Tom Freeman depicts the post-Sand Pebbles gunboat Tutuila (PG-44) at Chungking in 1939—McKenna's era.
In 1966, a Hollywood epic captivated moviegoers across the United States. Directed by Robert Wise and starring Steve McQueen and Candice Bergen, The Sand Pebbles portrayed a sailor on board a U.S. Navy gunboat on the Yangtze River in the 1920s. Some became so fascinated with the movie they bought the novel by the same name. Written by Richard McKenna, The Sand Pebbles arguably is the best fictional depiction of the U.S. Navy's China gunboatmen. Of the book, historian George V. Traylor wrote: "If someone unaccustomed to detailed historical works were interested in understanding the enormous struggles that have transformed the Chinese people since 1911, what better beginning could he make?" Robert Shenk, a scholar who has studied McKenna and his body of work, notes: "In both the small details and the larger phenomena of the cultural milieu with which it deals, The Sand Pebbles gives the reader a feel for the very texture of the times, for what it was like to be a crewman on the eve of the Chinese Revolution in a gunboat of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet." McKenna was qualified to portray life on a Yangtze River gunboat; he served on board one in the 1930s and was a career enlisted man with 22 years' service in the Navy. His life was as fascinating as his only novel.
Richard Milton McKenna was born on 9 May 1913 at Mountain Home, Idaho, into a poor family. His father hauled freight for the mines. At a young age, Richard's two delights were movies and reading. "I never had the price of a movie in those days," he recalled much later. "I was lucky to see one once a year." When he discovered the local public library, suddenly "it seemed to me that a library was like a town with thousands of movies showing at once, and you could go to any one you wished at any time or place that pleased you, and the others would all still be showing any time you wanted to see them, and, best of all, it did not cost anything." The young boy managed to read most of the fiction and a good deal of the nonfiction in the library, although his mother thought excessive reading bad for him, and at one time forbade him to bring books home.
McKenna's father abandoned his family, which placed it in such desperate financial straits that the McKennas once were evicted from their home. Even though a good student, McKenna knew he would not attend college. Years later he said the problem was "much more starkly elemental: How to escape the iron pinch of enforced idleness and poverty and the terrible sense of personal unworth they generated." After almost a year of unemployment, the young man enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 18 and began sending much of his money home.
After a brief stint as an apprentice hospital corpsman, McKenna took the transport USS Chaumont (AP-5) to Guam. For the voyage, he "brought a dollar's worth of old magazines aboard with me and spread them evenly under the thin mattress of my bunk deep in a cargo hold." He decided he would prefer work in the engineering spaces of a ship, and his first was the USS Gold Star (AK-12), the station ship at Guam, where the young sailor began training to become a machinist's mate.
McKenna continued his obsession for reading. He recalled later difficulties in finding books on board ships. In the Gold Star, for example, the only library consisted of three books in a locked case. A shipmate once said "that such was the scarcity of books on ships and such was McKenna's love of reading that he would even peruse from cover to cover the pages of a railroad timetable if nothing better was available."
In October 1937, McKenna reported to the USS Asheville (PG-21) in Shanghai. He next reported to the destroyer Edsall (DD-219) for a short tour. Both of these ships operated from Shanghai and cruised the China coast.
On 10 June 1939, McKenna reported on board the USS Luzon (PG-47), a gunboat on the Yangtze River. While serving as a "river rat," he absorbed the sea stories of his shipmates about the years of unrest that marked the 1920s. His career continued upward, and he received promotion to machinist's mate first class in 1939. Much later he admitted that, like many sailors of the Asiatic Fleet, he had wanted to retire in China.
McKenna's return to the United States in March 1942 turned out to be the turning point of his life. He felt the old days in the Orient were gone, and "it was not a pleasant revelation" to know his "future was suddenly uncertain," he said. The treatment of Japanese Americans shocked him. "The mood of the people . . . [of the United States] seemed to me almost that of a lynch mob." At this juncture, McKenna felt he wanted a formal education. "My design was to gain a formal education, to acquaint myself with all areas of thought, simply by reading books. I kept at it year after year." He learned, however, that it was "not enough to be literate in letters; one had also be literate in ideas . . . I decided that I must attend a university."
In World War II he served in the USS Mount Vernon (AP-22), a transport that moved troops from San Francisco to Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. The transport steamed through the Panama Canal to cities on the East Coast and made trips into the Mediterranean and back. During this service McKenna was promoted to chief petty officer.
Shortly after the war, McKenna entered the Special Enlisted Prize Essay Contest sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute. His entry, "Post-War Chief Petty Officer: A Closer Look," won the $500 prize and a Gold Medal and was published in the December 1948 issue of Proceedings. This article marked McKenna's first paid published work. The essay also resulted in shore duty and a writing assignment at the Great Lakes U.S. Naval Training Station. McKenna did not change his rate to journalist, because he did not like having to put the Navy's "message" into everything he wrote. This meant he once more returned to sea and this time on board a destroyer. The start of the Korean War caused McKenna to receive an involuntary two-year extension.8 While serving in the engine rooms of the destroyer USS Van Valkenburgh (DD-656), he wrote to "his former commanding officer at Great Lakes, Captain John S. Keating, who was then commander of the ROTC [reserve officer training corps] unit at the University of North Carolina [at Chapel Hill]." McKenna informed his former commanding officer that he wanted to be a writer, but Captain Keating advised him "instead to enroll in the University of North Carolina and use his GI Bill to get an education."
In 1953, Richard McKenna was able to retire with 22 years of naval service. He took Captain Keating’s advice and enrolled at the University of North Carolina and thrived in the academic environment. Not only did he graduate with high academic honors, he married a university librarian.
When McKenna decided to be a writer, he felt there would be much less competition in writing science fiction and had taken more science courses than most students majoring in English. His first published science fiction story, “Casey Agonistes,” concerns naval enlisted men. Other stories soon followed. But McKenna became aware that many readers of science fiction did not share his passion for hard science.
McKenna wrote: “My material is everything I know,…all my new knowledge I take into myself must become somehow assimilated to my lived experience before I can make effective use of it in putting words on paper.” Soon, stories materialized of Navy enlisted men who worked in engine rooms. McKenna said he “wrote a yarn I heard in China as a boy. My story did not quite reach to that yarn, but it set the stage for it. So I wrote a second story with the same characters and setting, and again I fell short of the germinal yarn.” His agent, Rogers Terrill, however, sold both stories but felt McKenna actually had “a novel in the material.” McKenna remembered later that at first he fought the idea but eventually decided to take the plunge. The result was The Sand Pebbles, published by Harper & Row in 1962, which won the Harper Prize in 1963. According to McKenna, when the manuscript was accepted, he had $20 left in his savings account. He died one year later at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Even though he had moved away from science fiction, he received, posthumously (because most of his science fiction was published after his death), the 1966 Nebula Award for his science fiction story “The Secret Place.”
A stereotypical picture exists today of enlisted U.S. sailors, especially those who serve during peacetime. Jack Tar is touted either as being a drunken n’er-do-well, whose greatest pleasures are womanizing and fighting, or as a very simple person who is, at bottom, just a kindly bumbling fellow, who needs the guidance of a parent figure—in this case, his officers. Writers have perpetrated these formulas. But Richard McKenna’s writings and life shattered these clichés.
Senior Chief Noble served in the U.S. Coast Guard from 1957 to 1978. He earned a Ph.D. in U.S. history with a dissertation on the U.S. military in China, inspired by The Sand Pebbles. He is the author of nine books and numerous articles in magazines and journals, including Proceedings and Naval History. He writes full-time from his home in Sequim, Washington.