Oral History—China Station

I was on the USS Chaumont (AP-5)— the slow boat to China—from May through July 1940. In those days, there were only two transports in the whole Navy—the Chaumont and the Henderson (AP-1). The Chaumont had a bad name about carrying Marines. The old story goes that at one time a Marine was on one of her perpetual working parties. They had him over the side, and his job was to touch up the paint around the name on the stem. So he wrote under each letter. Under C, he wrote “Christ.” Under H, he wrote “Help.” Under A, he wrote “All,” and so on. “Christ, Help All U.S. Marines On Naval Transports.” He left it there, and it wasn’t detected for a day or so. The ships in the vicinity had a laugh. That may or may not be true; I don’t know.

The Chaumont was a colorful ship in that she had on board all the time this hodgepodge of every conceivable type— all the way from prisoners and nuts to drafts, going to and from the Asiatic station. I remember one night when we went fairly close by the island of Formosa. You could smell smoke from the many cooking fires, and it just struck me as incredibly romantic to be there in that part of the world and to smell those strange smells.

When we reached Shanghai, I went on board the USS Augusta (CA-31). I was yeoman for the Asiatic Fleet operations officer, whose name was Commander Harry B. Slocum. If I am immodest enough to say so, I was an excellent typist and a good shorthand man too. I took great pride in being both. One of the biggest jobs I had for Commander Slocum was the fleet movement reports, which were all encrypted. I maintained a master list of all the ports in the Far East. Then we would put out dispatches that listed all the ships, their whereabouts, and so on.

I remember one incident months later when the Asiatic Fleet flag was on the USS Houston (CA-30). The USS Gold Star (AG-12) was going to arrive in Hong Kong on a certain day. It was part of my job to type up a dispatch that would then go out to customs, requesting medical pratique on arrival. The dispatch had to get there three days before the arrival. It was a routine thing I did for all the ships in the fleet.

Well, I had the dispatch for the Gold Star all made up, ready to be signed. When they passed the word about liberty, I put that dispatch in the lock drawer of my desk. I meant to go down, put on my liberty uniform, come back up, take it up and get it released, leave it with the communication watch officer (CWO), and go ashore. It worked out just fine, except I didn’t go back up to the office. I went ashore and was ashore for the weekend.

Monday I came back, and I felt this terrible premonition come on me. I opened my lock drawer, and there was that dispatch. This was Monday, and the Gold Star was due in that day. I took the dispatch and went up to the radio shack and showed it to the CWO. He was as filled with alarm as I was. I said, “Is there any way in the world you can get this off right now?”

He said, “I’ll try, but this is bad. This is real, real, real bad.”

I went back to my desk and was told Commander Slocum wanted to see me. I knew I was in bad trouble. God, he ate me out. He emphasized the gravity, because Hong Kong was an international port and the Gold Star could have been kept out of the harbor if the British had wanted to. After the preliminaries, I said, “Well, Commander Slocum, all I can say is that I’ve worked for you a year, and I’ve never made a mistake like this before.”

He said, “You don’t make a mistake like this the first time. You don’t ever make a mistake like this.” Oh, he gave me hell. He should have. I deserved every damn thing that he said. But he didn’t hold a grudge, and he saved my neck, literally, in all the maneuvering in who went where after the war started. I'd be a dead duck today if it weren’t for him.

Well, back to the summer of 1940.1 had this feeling—almost a mystic feeling—about the Asiatic Fleet. By that time, I had seen so many Asiatic sailors and heard so many tales and everything that I could hardly realize I was finally in the Asiatic Fleet. On board the Augusta were all these legends. Danny Wahlmer for example, was a first class dental technician who had spent a lot of time in the Far East and at one time was at the Pc king Embassy as a naval dental tech Danny and the Asiatic Fleet were made for each other. He took on all the color.

The print shop on the Augusta was the place. That’s where the insiders met" the yeomen, the printers, an occasional cook. That’s where they had the coffee pot, and they had a windup record player- That was the elite place to be. One time a guy named Squirrel Worrels, one of the printers, wanted to get a gold dragon in his ear. So he asked Danny to pierce his ear. Danny said, “Of course.” So the next night Danny brought up this kit from the sick bay, and he had a needle. It was curved and had three sides. So Danny put Squirrel on a little stool, sat him there, and he grabbed his ear. He punched that needle into his ear. When he got it halfway through, he said to Squirrel—and his voice sounded very funny—“Are yon all right?”

Squirrel said, “Yeah.”

Danny fainted, just fell right over. So none of us knew what to do. Hell, I wasn’t going to pull that needle out of some guy’s ear, that big, three-cornered needle. So somebody went to the sick bay, and the doctor came up. I guess he saw as much humor in it as anything else, so he went over to Squirrel, and pulled it on through, and stuffed some cotton in there. By that time Danny was sitting up, and he was wailing. The doctor said to Squirrel, “If you people want to get your ears pierced, if you’re that stupid, come down to sick bay and we’ll talk about it. But don’t sit up here in the print shop poking holes in somebody’s ears with this.”

Everything Danny did was kind of colorful. For some reason he had this imaginary dog. And everybody went along with it, you know. He would go down the ship calling the dog along with him as if it were really there—just another indication of Danny’s being Asiatic. It was that kind of thing and those kinds of people that I thought were the real Asiatics.

On my first liberty there I was, going ashore in Shanghai, China. I was sitting in the motor launch across from this real, honest-to-god local Chinese mess-boy type who was going ashore. I guess he was 50 years old. He knew that I was a new arrival, so he said to me in a very imperious tone of voice, “Which name belong to you?”

He knew I was fresh on the “Augie.” I was as respectful as if he were an admiral. I said, “My name is King.”

And he said, “It’s a good Chinese name. You take care. You be good boy.”

I said, “Right. Right.” I mean, I was going to do what he told me to. I was real impressed with the guy. I cultivated these guys on board ship because I love Chinese food and I enjoyed being around them. They cooked their own meals, their own style, in the galley and ate there after the officers ate.

I knew a lot of guys out there who’d been there for 10, 15, 20 years and had no idea of ever going back. When I got there, there was a prohibition against Carrying Chinese or Filipinos. But a number of Asiatic Fleet sailors had Chinese wives; some had Russian wives. The social contacts in Shanghai were mostly with a large colony of White Russians there. These were people that I felt so damn sorry for. They didn’t have passports, but they were proud people; they were the aristocracy. And, gosh, they were nice people. We enjoyed their company. The girls were just beautiful. Some of them were honest-to-god royalty. It was not a great number, but I recall some Russian-American marriages.

On most of the ships in the Asiatic meet there was a definite air of pride in being an Asiatic sailor. That really permeated the whole ship. Everyone was aware that this was the Asiatic Fleet, the bamboo navy,” and there was pride in that. It was like a French Foreign Legion type thing. In the latter days of 1941, maybe even before that, there were one or two stateside ships that came out, bringing troops. This annoyed us no end. We didn’t like that at all. We called them Hollywood sailors. We didn’t go out and get in serious trouble, but there was a feeling of resentment. Here we had volunteered to go out there and had our 30 months’ obligated service, and these guys came out and enjoyed our privileges without paying their dues. So we didn’t like that.

My brother Howard and I were ashore one night when the USS Cincinnati (CL- 6) was in Manila. We went ashore and saw a few of her sailors here and there. The more we thought about it, the madder we got. Finally, Howard said, “Let’s chase a couple of them back to their ship.” So, under the influence of, I guess, some rum and Cokes, we thought we’d do that. We went to a place called Whitey Smith’s Metro Garden, a very popular watering hole. Howard and I went in and sat down. It was very dark inside. Howard finally decided it was time to declare himself. He was a skinny kid—not a very formidable adversary, I must say. But he stood up and said, “Are there any Cincinnati sailors in the house?”

Right behind me, and sort of to Howard’s right, were these four big, gargantuan firemen off the Cincinnati. I guess they knew that Howard was not friendly. So they stood up, and one of them said, “Yeah, we're on the Cincinnati. So what?”

Howard said, “How does she feed— pretty good?” and then sat back down. Boy, was I scared. I thought we were going to get murdered. But that was the kind of thing that took place. I mean, it was, to some extent, good-natured. There was a definite air of, “They shouldn’t be out here fouling up our liberty.” Not only was there the ordinary camaraderie that you get on a small ship out there, but that was then reinforced and emphasized by the Asiatic aspect of it. It was a very close-knit outfit. I was impressed by that and saw many evidences of that on the beach and other places.

Oh, I was quite a liberty hound in those days. A friend of mine, another first class yeoman named Eddie Gaghen, and I were running mates on the beach. He and I took a little place in Shanghai in the French concession. We were going to be there for a couple of weeks, and that was kind of the thing to do. There was a British firm named Gandy Price that had, I believe, a franchise for almost every kind of alcohol sold in the entire Far East. They had a showroom on the waterfront— a big luxurious place with shelves all around. On those shelves was every kind of alcoholic beverage the world has ever known. It had big easy chairs, kind of a club atmosphere. You would go in and sit down and a couple of Chinese would come over and bring whatever in the world you wanted to drink. You couldn’t stump them. That was all on the house. That’s while you were deciding what you wanted to get. Finally you’d say, “Well, I’ll take two bottles of Johnnie Walker Red,” maybe 50 cents a bottle, some ridiculous price.

Eddie and I stopped there when we took this little apartment. We thought we’d get a few things to take out there, so we ordered a bottle of scotch, a bottle of this, a bottle of that. We decided to get a case of beer that they were going to deliver later that day. That afternoon, a big commotion developed out in the street, and we looked out. It turned out that a case was 36 quart bottles of beer, each one wrapped in straw. The Chinese way of life is that any time there’s work available, 300 will line up for it. They had these yo-ho poles, and they’d have one bottle in the front basket, and one bottle in the second basket. They would come up the stairs, deliver it to the place, and get a clacker (a Chinese coin). I don’t know how many Chinese delivered those 36 bottles of beer, but it was a lot. We had straw-wrapped bottles of beer in the kitchen, in the bedroom, the bathroom, all over the place.

It was just that kind of thing that made me realize that the Asiatic Fleet was unique, and I was sorry I hadn’t gone out there years before. Shanghai was a paradise if there ever was one. It just seemed to suit me; I couldn’t get enough of it. The cost of living was almost nothing. The first time you went ashore, you were taken over by a certain rickshaw driver. He was your rickshaw driver the rest of the time you ever went ashore. And don’t ever worry about him finding you; when you went ashore, there he was. I had never been treated like that in my whole life, and I enjoyed it. There was something romantic about a town like Shanghai. I never saw anything like it, and I guess I’ll never see it again. But I thought that was as near as I’ll ever come to being in heaven. If it hadn’t been for World War II, I would never have come back. I was at the peak of my life then.