At the end of any given year we can look back on the days that were good, bad, or humdrum. Fortunately, there are a few that qualify as great. Two of the latter stick out for the year 1999, because they involved spending time with a proverbial legend in his own time.
Kemp Tolley was born in 1908, so he has experienced and observed nearly all of the 20th century. In that time, he has also acquired a legion of admirers, and several dozen of them were on hand for one of my most enjoyable days of the year just past. In May, veterans of the old Asiatic Fleet, Yangtze River Patrol, and South China Patrol gathered in reunion at Timonium, Maryland. Rear Admiral Tolley and his family were the honored guests. Even the youngest of the veterans were in their mid-70s, because the Navy’s Far East Fleet was swallowed up in defeat in 1942. The oldest was 95-year-old Commander Tex Anders, who in 1937 was executive officer of the river gunboat Panay when Japanese aircraft bombed and sank her near Nanking, China.
Another of the great days came in July, when I joined the Naval Institute’s photo archivist, Dawn Stitzel, in a journey to Tolley’s home in Monkton, Maryland. The admiral had offered to let us add to the Naval Institute’s photo collection any pictures we wanted from his own vast horde. Dozens and dozens of 8- by-10 prints awaited us, and what a happy chore it was to look through them, particularly because Tolley regaled us with sea stories and land stories the entire time we were perusing the pictures.
Some of the pictures depicted Tolley himself in the exotic costumes he wore on occasion; his time in amphibious craft; his tenure as an assistant naval attaché in the Soviet Union in World War II; his command of the U.S. naval station in Yokosuka, Japan; and a bevy of pretty women that he had met along the way. One image of an Italian woman who had served as a photographer’s model was particularly striking. We saw pictures of a Russian actress who bore a child in World War II with U.S. Navy Captain Jackson Tate. And there were lots of pictures of Tolley’s wife Vlada and their two daughters, because it was clear that family was special to him.
Fortunately, Tolley has written several books—all published by the Naval Institute Press—including a history of the Yangtze Patrol, his command of the schooner Lanikai on the eve of World War II, and his experiences in the Soviet Union during the war. And a number of years ago he sat with my predecessor, Dr. John Mason, for an oral history that came to 855 pages. As the saying goes, the man can spin a yarn.
For instance, he said his interest in studying the Russian language stemmed from meeting some cute White Russians in Shanghai in 1932. He wanted to find out what they were saying behind his back. The study of Russian was far from a typical subject for a Naval Academy graduate of the era, but he demonstrated then, and at many other times, that he dislikes the routine and the stereotype. Once, when he was in Riga, Latvia, he was quite taken by the beautiful blonde daughter of the Swedish Army attaché. So he fortified himself with some liquid courage and said to her, “Maud, I’ll make you a proposition. If you will say yes in 30 minutes, I’ll marry you.” She didn’t, and thus he didn’t.
His language study also took him to Manchuria, which the Japanese had taken over and were calling Manchukuo. Tolley enjoyed going to a local club that was run along British lines. While there, it was customary to park one’s guns at the door because there had been several shootings when people got too many gin and tonics in them. As the admiral told Dr. Mason many years later, all the drinks cost five cents apiece, so “You could hardly afford not to drink.”
During his various tours in the Far East, Tolley adopted for himself a subspecialty of intelligence gathering. One example came in Hong Kong in the 1930s. He wanted to see the fortifications at Fort Stanley, and the British there were not so inclined to share information as in later years. So Tolley put on a tropical uniform, including shorts and an elephant hunter’s hat. Then he borrowed someone else’s wife and dog and strolled into the fort, announcing himself as “Leftenant Tolley.” By pretending to be a British officer, out with his family, he could observe things that an American officer by himself would not have been allowed to.
His final mission in the Asiatic Fleet came when he was directed to commission the Lanikai and flaunt her off Indochina. He perceived it as an attempt by President Franklin Roosevelt to bait the Japanese into an overt act that would give the United States grounds for entering the Pacific War. Instead, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Then he and his crew had to wend their way thousands of miles through Japanese-con- trolled waters. They made it from the Philippines to the Dutch East Indies and eventually Australia. There Tolley was met by Rear Admiral William Purnell, who greeted him by saying, “My God. What are you doing here? You're supposed to be dead.”
Fortunately, that supposition was not true then, nor is it now.