A canton flower boat is something like one of the old offshore gambling ships of southern California, except that aboard a Flower Boat there is neither official nor unofficial limit to the types of entertainment which are offered. There are recreations and joys and vices to suit every condition of age, taste, and unrestraint. And because of the greater tolerance of the Chinese in these things, the Flower Boat is not required to anchor beyond the three-mile limit; it ties up right alongside the dock. This accessibility is not only very handy for the pleasure-seeking patrons, but it enables the bouncer to push objectionable customers over the gangway without their being automatically drowned.
Having explained the general character of this unique and delightful Chinese craft which never goes to sea, I am sure the reader will understand that solely because of operational area, and not because of on-board activities, the U.S.S. Mindanao, river gunboat, became nick-named in south China waters as the Canton Flower Boat. Nevertheless there was some resemblance, for the Mindanao, a long, flat-bottomed, shallow draft gunboat, was certainly not designed to go to sea. Moreover, she was equipped for a little less severity of living than the sterner types of which the Navy is mostly composed.
When I reported for duty in September, 1941, after years aboard battleships, cruisers and destroyers—the real “General Quarters” Navy—I was scarcely prepared for some of the new sidelights on nautical life which were presented by the Mindanao, flagship of the South China Patrol, and actually its only ship on station at the time. As an example of naval architecture, she was probably as awkward looking a monstrosity as anything launched since Noah built the ark. But, like many a plain girl, she had compensations which wore well and endeared her to her menfolk. Owing to her extremely shallow draft, her structure was almost entirely above the water line, and except for buff stacks she was painted a snowy white. These characteristics undoubtedly made her look much larger than she really was, but at the same time it meant that all her ventilation was happily provided by ordinary windows, even in the engine room. There were certainly never many ships of the fleet in which the “black gang,” plying their oil cans and monkey wrenches, could look right out the window at the passing scenery of that world which they had joined the Navy to see.
But there were even greater luxuries than this. A small upper deck just abaft the bridge was known as the Palm Garden. It was equipped with some rather dilapidated wicker furniture, and I was told that at one time the Palm Garden actually boasted real potted palms. The whole area was cooled by the shade of a large awning. In spite of the fact that I felt it was very inappropriate aboard a man-of-war, the Palm Garden was nevertheless an extremely pleasant place to sit in the evening, chatting with dinner guests of Chinese or English extraction, and watching the twinkling lights up “The Peak” which furnishes the mountain background of which Hong Kong is so proud. Thus the Mindanao made up for her lack of gracefulness and dashing style by being extremely comfortable to be with, a method which is often more permanently alluring.
The entire upper surface of the large awning which shielded the Palm Garden had been converted by appropriate painting into a giant American flag. This practice was inaugurated for China river gunboats after the unfortunate affair of the Panay, and it was facetiously suggested that perhaps the intent was to enable stray Japanese aircraft to identify their victims more easily. In order that such recognition be continuous, the flag was illuminated at night by a floodlight installed at each masthead. Regardless of intent, the result was ineffectual, because from even a moderate altitude, particularly at night, the American flag looks exactly like the Chinese flag, for the white stripes dissolve into the red, and the stars dissolve into the blue field. Thus for all practical purposes any impetuous young Japanese aviator would not know whether he was attacking an American ship or a Chinese, and in all probability it would not have made a great deal of difference as far as he personally was concerned.
In addition to the confusing possibilities with her awning flag, the Mindanao was subject to numerous other Chinese influences. Her two small powerboats were very flat- bottomed and were known as motor sampans. Her crew actually included more than a dozen Chinese (who could enlist only for duty on the Asiatic station). I still remember my amusement when first inspecting the ship and arriving at the compartment occupied by the Chinese. It was used as sleeping quarters only; in fact, the overhead was so low that one could not stand upright, and even its deck space was not very large.
“How many people sleep in here,” I asked the Chinese sailor in charge of the compartment. Very gravely and courteously he gave me my first lesson in pidgin English:
“Fourteen piecey Chinamen.”
The Mindanao and her sisters were actually built in Shanghai, and so it was not strange that she should embody considerable evidence of her Chinese heritage. Not only was she one of the few ships of the Navy to have a fireplace in the wardroom (though actually it was only a flat non-working decoration), but the mantelpiece radiated a distinctly oriental feeling with three large carved Chinese ideographs which rendered the ship’s name as phonetically as possible, given the natural limitations of the few ideographs which actually indicate a pronounced syllable.
Most of our Chinese crew members were stewards, cooks, and mess boys. While their strata in the hierarchy of naval rank aboard ship was not particularly exalted, they occupied a much different station among their fellows ashore. All things are of course relative, and at their own homes, even our lowest rated mess boys were veritable kings. Their salaries, at the smallest rates of Navy pay, constituted sizeable fortunes in the financial language and experience of their contemporaries. Actually, our mess boys had, in turn, other mess boys of their own in their homes ashore. They had also made a pooled arrangement for the permanent hire of a boat employed exclusively for their own transportation to, and from the ship. Although aboard the Mindanao, the Chinese were stewards and cooks and mess boys, the minute they stepped onto the dock with its ragged beggar children droning, “No mama, no papa, no whiskey soda, no flight pay,” they became not only wealthy and fashionable, but very definitely men of distinction. In fact their job was considered to be so desirable that a young high school graduate begged to be put on the waiting list.
But by far the most sprightly of our Chinese influences was the group of young ladies who scrubbed the ship’s side every morning. The river gunboats had very little freeboard, and consequently the entire side could be reached easily from the small sampan in which these three girls lived out their lives. Each morning they restored the pristine whiteness of the Mindanao. These attentions in China apparently go by adoption plus mutual satisfactoriness of the arrangement, and our girls had adopted the Mindanao years before my arrival.
They did a superb job, and they invariably sang together softly as they worked. They were always as neat as pins, with their black hair carefully braided. Whenever I went out on deck, they turned their faces up with a wide smile of genuine friendliness while in their eyes was a sparkling joy of living such as I have seldom beheld. You would suppose them to be the happiest and most fortunate trio of girls who ever lived, and perhaps they felt that they were, because in exchange for their daily labors, they received all the ship’s garbage just for themselves. Moreover, because the entire ship’s company felt a respect and an affection for these happy, hard-working girls, we often supplemented their “take” with various gifts, and sometimes even a whole bag of rice, which in China is really something pretty wonderful.
II
In connection with the turnover of command upon my arrival we planned a familiarization run, out through the channel between the islands to the westward of Hong Kong. This was the first part of the route to Canton (in Chinese, Kwangchowfu), on the Pearl River (Chu Kiang). Formerly Canton had been the home port of the Mindanao, from which she made occasional trips down the river and to Hong Kong. But with the Japanese occupation the procedure had been exactly reversed. Hong Kong became the base, and the ship made her visits to Canton.
A permanent mooring buoy, designed to be typhoon proof, was assigned to the Mindanao in Hong Kong harbor, and as we cast loose on the morning of the turnover run, the-points of valuable interest of both the ship and the locality were explained to me. Naturally, a river gunboat is provided with many special characteristics required by her occupation—characteristics, which are considerably dissimilar from her deep water sisters. Moreover, given a natural habitat of shallow inland rivers, she is not equipped with many facilities that would be necessary if she ever attempted to cope with the rougher waters of the open sea and the requirements of celestial navigation.
The Mindanao was some 210 feet long, with a beam of about 30 feet, so she appeared to be quite a large craft, particularly as she had so much superstructure. She was, in all honesty, very awkward and topheavy looking. Her draft was extremely shallow, averaging from six to eight feet. She was driven by reciprocating engines, had twin screws, and three rudders—a large center rudder between the screws, with a smaller one outboard of each screw. This combination gave her almost startling maneuverability, which was often necessary in the sharp and unexpected turns of the Pearl River. Her designed top speed was about 15 knots, but I soon became convinced that this was only a “paper asset.”
The armament of the Mindanao was not impressively formidable. Her secondary battery consisted of Lewis machine guns on pedestal mounts. While those on the main- deck amidships carried a light protective shield, others above the bridge and on a small elevated deck aft were completely unprotected in any way. The main battery was composed of two 3-inch guns, one located forward and the other aft. They carried the usual blast shield for the pointer and trainer, while their platforms were provided with a unique form of protection against bullets from the rear. The guns could of course be expected to fire on small boats or at marauders along the low banks of the river, and therefore would frequently need to be depressed considerably below the horizontal. This prevented any great height of protection being placed around the gun mount, particularly on that side of the ship on which action might be taking place. But suppose you are shooting at bandits on one side of the river, nothing would prevent your being seriously injured by snipers aiming at your rear from the other side. Therefore, a series of rectangular sheets of steel was provided with legs at the bottom which could be fitted into sockets around the edge of the gun platform. These movable armor plates were perhaps six feet tall when they were in place, and in spite of their intended portability they were rather heavy and cumbersome. I could visualize a lively river battle, with an attack first from one side and then the other, while the struggling, sweating gun crews trained their guns back and forth and shifted the armor plates from one side to the opposite, to be sure their rear was always protected. I must admit it looked rather impossible to me, but after all, no one had apparently challenged the effectiveness of the arrangement in a dozen years of service, so probably my doubt sprang solely from being a “griffin” (newcomer) who was not yet accustomed to the ways of the so-called mysterious East.
But to me the most astounding feature of the armament of the Mindanao was a large locker of hand weapons, including Tommy guns, sawed-off shotguns, pistols, and cutlasses. And when do you think these were to be used? I found out during the emergency drills which were being conducted for my benefit. Did I hear my ears correctly? What was the bos’n’s mate calling? Shades of John Paul Jones and Stephen Decatur! Believe it or not, the word being passed was:
“All hands, repel boarders!”
Fore and aft, throughout the ship, windows were being slid down and locked; the engineroom windows had steel shutters which were swung clattering into place to help keep steam pipes from being punctured by flying rifle bullets. The bridge window spaces were also being protected with steel shutters, each having a small peephole slot. Men were scurrying in every direction taking up their stations along the rail as they brandished pistols and swords, prepared to whack off a head or two if necessary. I was delighted, although I had supposed that such activities went out of fashion in 1812. Yet here I was, in the Year of Grace 1941, about to take over a ship which included in her general drills the repelling of boarders!
As the permanently hired Chinese pilot conducted the ship toward a point between two small islands, I noted that nobody was taking any bearings or plotting the ship’s position; in fact, there were no facilities on the bridge with which to take bearings. The native pilot was an elderly Chinese who spoke practically no English and gave all his directions to the steersman by motions of his hand. I was told that he had been on this “run” every since the ship went into commission and that he was so very skillful, that no plots of position were considered necessary. When I was further informed that he maintained a wife and a family at each end of the run, I was perfectly willing to admit that he must indeed be an extremely skillful fellow, but in my nautical experience not skillful enough to pilot the ship without the navigator’s keeping any graphical account of where she might be!
In proceeding between the scattered islands, some of the channels looked like complete dead ends until just as I was sure that the bow was about to run aground, the ship spun on a dime impelled by her three rudders, and swung into another outlet ninety degrees away. It was not hard to understand the value of such quick maneuverability in the twisting channel of the Pearl River.
The ways of the East were further expounded to me—at least the ways of a gun boat in a China river—when I was advised that the river bottom was constantly shifting, and depths as marked on charts could not be depended upon. However, this was not serious, as the ship was so flat-bottomed that she could rest very nicely on a sand or mud flat with no damage whatsoever; and should she actually slide aground, it was only necessary to be patient until high tide, when she would float off easily and the voyage could proceed. I must admit that this concept was considerably foreign to anything I had been taught about letting your ship go aground! Of course the above practice could be fraught with serious embarrassment, for there is considerable fall of the rivers at certain seasons of the year, and the tide might not only fail to come back to a height sufficient to float the ship, but would recede completely, leaving her high and dry for a whole season. In fact there is a story of this very thing happening to one of our gunboats operating far up stream, well into the interior of China. When the ship’s company realized their predicament, they decided that the long wait for the river to rise to their rescue should not be wasted. Some of them created paddy fields in the muddy area surrounding the ship in order to start a crop of rice, for food was not too plentiful; while others, equally ambitious but less agricultural minded, even went so far as to start families! Reportedly, both groups were highly successful before the rains came and released them from their immobile trap.
As we turned back toward Hong Kong a burst of speed was demonstrated. Turns were gradually increased and the ship began to vibrate and then to shudder. I was assured that her long shallow construction made this flexibility quite normal. Finally turns were piled on to the limit of safety. We must have been making all of thirteen knots, and had I been blindfolded, the manner in which the Mindanao humped along would have made me certain that I was riding a frightened camel. I realized sharply what the midshipmen’s textbook in naval architecture meant when it tried to explain the terms “hogging and sagging!”
Then we slowed down and headed for our buoy. The approach was both difficult and awkward because of the dozens of sampans and junks that always fill the harbor of Hong Kong, and which proceed leisurely, without deviation, on whatever their business may be. Apparently they do not know that such a thing as rules of the road exist; or perhaps it is true that they really are trying to shake off those unseen pursuing devils by cutting sharply across the bows of moving ships. At any rate their careless practices cause a great deal of whistle blowing and considerable hair tearing on the part of incoming skippers.
A small boat was drifting near our buoy, and probably I do not need to tell you that its occupants were our three Chinese sailor girls. During the ship’s absence they had scrubbed the buoy, and now they were waiting to assist in the mooring. A seaman on the foc’s’l tossed them a line; they pulled quickly to the buoy; and one of them scrambled onto its tipping, bobbing surface with more sure-footed alacrity than most of our crew could boast. In no time at all the Mindanao was secured to her buoy, and the liberty party was on its way ashore.
III
Interesting as I found Hong Kong, I nevertheless realized that the Navy Department did not send me to the Orient to study local customs. Particularly, as within a week after my arrival I learned in a rather startling way that the Mindanao needed considerable study herself.
When I left Washington in the summer of 1941, one of my realistic friends in the Navy Department had said brightly:
“I don’t believe you’re going to make it there in time.”
Naturally there was a certain amount of expectant tension in the Far East, though a great many persons felt that nothing would come of it. But whatever might happen, it would certainly involve some sea-going on the part of the Mindanao; she could not expect to go right on swinging-around a typhoon buoy, and that is exactly what she failed to do. I had been assured that the typhoon buoy was absolutely dependable, and so it proved to be. However, when my first typhoon struck, we yawed and jerked like a tethered tiger in spite of using the engines and rudders. The jerk became so violent that suddenly the pelican hooks sprung enough to let the chain run right out the hawse pipe and through the ring in the buoy. Away we went in the twinkling of an eye!
I did not know such winds existed except in manufactured movie representations of typhoons and hurricanes. The China river gunboat, completely loose in a bad storm for the first time, took a relentless buffeting and pounding. Over and over again we tried to anchor in the lee of one of the harbor islands, and over and over we dragged, no matter what the scope of chain. So we abandoned the idea and pushed our way back into the heavy seas of the harbor, hoping that we should be able to ride it out. The heaviest gusts were too much for the Canton Flower Boat and lurched her toward the shore. Then providentially, a slight lull enabled her engines to propel her out toward the center of the harbor again. This extremely trying alternation went on for hours until the changing direction of the wind finally indicated that its maximum intensity had passed. A large merchant ship piled up on the rocks, a sight which did not add to our equanimity. It was obvious that the Mindanao had never really been secured for sea. Veritable showers of objects fell off shelves and lockers, while bulkier items tipped over throughout the ship, demonstrating that her long tranquil life on the Pearl River had led to considerable nautical carelessness that would have to be rectified before she ever attempted any deep sea ventures such as might reasonably be expected.
By ten o’clock that evening the wind and sea had abated sufficiently so that we could anchor for the night. Special lookouts took up posts to watch for drifting mines which the storm might have dislodged from their planted fields.
The next morning it was quite calm again. We got underway and headed for our buoy. As we approached we saw the inevitable sampan drifting nearby. Soon our three loyal Chinese girls were looking up with friendly smiles, reaching to catch our line.
Our typhoon breakaway had one healthy result. It wakened everybody to the rough realities of life as it might have to be lived, and we sat down to plan a comprehensive program of preparation in every department. The first essential was obviously to fit ourselves to go to sea without producing a torrent of tumbling gear. Suitable lashings, racks, and braces were devised, and when we made a trial run at sea, all hands were gratified by the results. However, the ship rolled deeply, with a sharp, short period that whipped men off their feet and reminded us that the three thin cables along the stanchions furnished rather dubious safety against falling overboard. So we purchased several hundred large screw eyes at the Chinese department store, put them into the wooden deck, and rove small manila line through the screw eyes and up over the top life line, producing eventually a very fair imitation of the “diamond netting” used aboard destroyers. One awkward feature of the trial trip was the fact that every time the ship pitched, the propellers, so shallowly located reared out of water and spun madly, putting a terrific strain on the shafts and engines. When the time came we would certainly have to weight the stern to keep it down and avoid wasting half our propeller power by fanning the air.
Navigationally, we devised a fairly effective instrument to be mounted in each wing window of the bridge for taking relative bearings. We swung ship for a new compass deviation card and put the two ensigns to taking daily sights in the afternoon when there was a sea horizon to the west from the anchorage.
I was interested in learning how much protection the portable gun shields really furnished, and so we took one plate ashore and fired rifles at decreasing ranges until we found the penetration distance. The demonstrated protective ability of these plates was, I must admit, on the disappointing side. Nevertheless, we decided that if we cut them in half we could make a low permanent “fence” all the way around the gun platform, instead of having a high, useless, partial fence that required hand shifting. Our new armored shield might not promise much protection on either the engaged or the disengaged side, but at least it would go all the way around and keep the gun crews from being knocked off the platform by blasts.
Our next step was to increase our offensive power by designing a special bracket for the gun mounts above the bridge and on an elevated platform aft. The new bracket permitted two Lewis machine guns to be fitted to each mount instead of one. The two guns were clamped together, barrels parallel, and with a trigger in each hand the gunner doubled his fire power. This used up the four spare guns to good advantage but left us without any reserves. However, I learned that only recently ten Browning machine guns had been shipped to us, and that they were supposed to be substituted for the Lewises as soon as appropriate mount adapters were available. But these guns, together with all the heavy and bulky engineering spare parts which could hardly be accommodated aboard our small ship, were stored in a godown (warehouse) ashore, which was rented just for the purpose. Naturally, in our more or less isolated situation we had to be fairly self-sufficient, and in the godown we had a spare propeller, a spare shaft, boiler tubes, and a thousand other pieces of gear and equipment. We could of course embark on a campaign without bringing the spare propeller aboard, but if we had to leave Hong Kong suddenly, it would be folly in the extreme to leave ten machine guns behind when no doubt we would urgently need all the strength we could muster. So we brought the Brownings aboard and uncrated them. They were on short tripods for field use, but we felt sure we could devise some manner of employing them aboard ship. Tentatively we found that one tripod leg could be lashed to a stanchion. With these ten Brownings mounted in some way we would have twenty-four machine guns. Such a bristling battery sounded a great deal more formidable, of course, than it actually was.
Another thing that needed remedy was the procedure for going to General Quarters. The process of having to ask several different levels in the chain of command for permission to conduct such a drill at a specific time was certainly unrealistic in the light of the speed with which an airplane could make an attack. There was a handful of British aircraft, called the “Hong Kong Air Force,” which made frequent local flights. Therefore, we adopted a convention that the first plane sighted each day by any person aboard should be the signal to man battle stations, and whoever sighted the plane should himself immediately sound the general alarm. While this practice sometimes caused certain inconvenience, it did perk up awareness of possible realities. However, most of the planes merely skirted the harbor at considerable distance from us. We needed something more realistic; we needed to become accustomed to the sight of a plane heading right at us in a determined, purposeful dive so that such high speed proximity would not in itself be too disconcerting, and also so that the guncrews could become accustomed to the terrific rates at which they would have to train and point their guns in order to have any hope of bringing down the attacker.
The accomplishment of our aims required a complicated international arrangement. Among the pilots of the local Chinse commercial airway was one very friendly young Chinese aviator, George Wong by name. He loved his profession so passionately that on his day off he used to rent a small plane and fly for the sheer joy of flying. Coupled with this intense professional preoccupation he also had one weakness upon which we preyed. He had an uncontrollable taste for Hollywood versions of the exciting life lived by the cowboys and Indians of the great western American plains and mountains. He would stamp and clap with the gleeful enthusiasm of a school boy as the heroic cowboys galloped and thundered over hill and dale just at the crucially exciting moment. So we struck up a mutually rewarding bargain. We promised to invite him aboard ship every time we had a Western movie if, for his part of the arrangement, he would agree that on his days off, when he flew a rented plane, he would dive and zoom and attack the Mindanao for a half hour or so. Results were more than gratifying to all concerned, and for our own part, our mental conditioning to the sight of a plane hurtling directly at us proved more valuable than we realized at the time, although occasionally I wondered if our intrepid Chinese flyer was going to knock off a masthead or a running light. One of the British officers ashore had rigged up a small metal model of an airplane so that it would slide rapidly down a steep wire, to furnish his gun pointers some practice in quick following, but the Mindanao was much better off than that—we had the real thing!
Early in November, 1941, we received instructions that in the event of hostilities we were to remain at Hong Kong and assist in its defense. To reinforce our position, hundreds of 3-inch shells and thousands of rounds of machine gun ammunition were sent up from Manila. Since the quantity was several times as much as we could accommodate in our small magazines aboard, we made arrangements to store it in a British magazine located on one of the harbor islands.
We had no illusions about the formidableness of the Mindanao; yet we did feel that, given all her inherent limitations, she was as well prepared for emergencies as a nautical pygmy can possibly be prepared.
IV
The day before Thanksgiving we made what was to be our last trip to Canton. Some ninety miles from Hong Kong, Canton was the end of the run for the China clippers of the mid-1800’s. It is also the ancestral home of practically all the Chinese in America, but you will not find any chop suey in the restaurants of Canton. Arrangements for visits to our former home port had to be made in advance with the Japanese, who controlled the Pearl River. At one point a small Japanese craft always conducted us through the cleared opening in a barrier of sunken ships which had been the futile and desperate effort of the Chinese to stop the Japanese a few years earlier. At Whampoa the bay-like swelling of the river is the uppermost point navigable by deep-sea vessels. It was alive with anchored Japanese cargo ships, but as we passed this anchorage all activity of every ship ceased, in typical Japanese secretiveness, so that it was impossible to tell whether ships were loading or unloading. Nor was there a single person visible on the deck of any ship.
A few miles farther, and in the late afternoon, the Mindanao moored to her usual buoy close to Shameen, the man-made island created years ago by agreement between the Chinese and the English so that all “foreign devils” could be localized at one detached spot.
Early on Thanksgiving morning I was a bit startled to realize that our anti-surprise aircraft doctrine was almost too effective. The general alarm was clanging away, bong, bong, bong, bong, and the crew were running for their gun stations. I stepped out of my cabin to see what was happening. One of the deck force had sighted several Japanese planes in the air, and had properly carried out our doctrine regarding the first plane of each day. We had not given a thought to the effect our automatic drill might have in these surroundings. Along the near-by seawall, Japanese guards came to life with startled expressions on their faces. Two Japanese minecraft, which were anchored in the river, seemed to be manning their battle stations, too. Our gunners were following the Japanese planes in their sights to the evident astonishment of all observers. Perhaps it would have been more discreet to have avoided such a belligerent display in a foreign area held by an uncordial occupation force! Nevertheless it had happened mechanically, following our new doctrine, and whether it was internationally punctilious or not, it did demonstrate to the Japanese that if they were entertaining any overt intentions, we were not going to be caught asleep. However, no bombs were dropped, nobody opened fire, and this minor international crisis gradually subsided as the guards along the sea wall relaxed again to parade rest.
Later in the forenoon, Commander South China Patrol (then Captain Lester J. Hudson, U. S. Navy) sent one of our ensigns ashore to try to arrange a call on the local Japanese Commanding General. But the ensign was unsuccessful. The General was just taking off for Tokyo, the Chief of Staff was starting somewhere else, and the next in line would, unfortunately, not be able to see anyone. His official excuse for such discourteous pre-occupation, which he sent back via the ensign was:
“Make big busy with fight.”
This might have been understandable and considerably less amusing had we realized that within ten days the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.
As Thanksgiving Day wore on, we had time to call on acquaintances at the American consulate and visit again some of the interesting sights in this famous city of the “Middle Kingdom.” As I walked about the streets of Canton, I watched the Japanese detain and search every rickshaw. I watched them frisk pedestrians at nearly every corner. Japanese cavalrymen galloped about, and in the late afternoon a drum and bugle corps stomped noisily up and down the street, blaring away to remind the local populace that their new masters were on the job. I did not suppose that within a few months my own continued existence would depend entirely upon how much rice these arrogant fellows chose to hand through the barbed wire. I have heard it said that optimism is simply not knowing what you have got coming to you!
V
On December 2, 1941, we were quite surprised to receive a message directing us to proceed to" Manila as soon as possible. We knew that the Yangtze River gunboats, from Shanghai, were already on their way to Manila—in fact they should have arrived; but in view of our recent instructions and the receipt of extra ammunition, we had naturally expected to remain at Hong Kong. However, the situation had apparently changed, for we were further directed to commandeer the services of a civilian oceangoing tug, which had just put into Hong Kong from the Philippines, to load it with the extra ammunition we had so recently received, and to sail in company for Manila.
There was still one unfinished detail of preparing the Mindanao for the high seas: the building of life rafts—work which was, however, approaching completion by a Chinese boat builder. The rafts were to be floated by light metal tanks, but it was also specified that the tanks should be filled with kapok so that in the event they should become punctured by machine gun fire there might still be a certain amount of positive buoyancy. When we told the Chinese builder we could not wait any longer for the rafts he agreed to have his obviously nonunion laborers work all night—because, to quote him, the job was “fiend business,” that is, being done for a friend. (Chinese can’t pronounce “r” and therefore they sometimes have filed lice on Fliday.)
In addition, we felt we should pick up as many of our spare machinery parts as we could handle, for no telling where we would ever be able to replace any of them. Remembering our experimental trips at sea, we secured the heavier parts on the fantail, hoping that their weight would help keep the stern down and the propellers under water when we began to pitch in the open sea.
At the godown, in addition to the spare parts, we also had maintained an extra six- months’ supply of staple and tinned foods. Even more than ever, nourishment might now become of vastly greater importance than spare parts, so we prepared to bring food aboard too. However, there was a staff of Americans at our Consulate General who would have no independent source of food if Hong Kong were besieged. We therefore divided our food stock, took half of it aboard, and turned the other half over to the Consul General. Had we realized how soon this food would be nourishing the Imperial Japanese Army, instead of Mr. Southard and his staff, we should not have divided it so equally.
On the morning of December 4 we cast off, bound for Manila. It was a bright morning, but a smart breeze indicated that it would not be smooth going when we reached the open sea. We could expect a rough ride from our cockleshell, which rode more like a chip than a ship. But we would be grateful if she merely held together long enough to reach the Navy Yard at Cavite.
Memories crowded as we maneuvered clear of the anchorage. No more would the Canton Flower Boat ply the Pearl River, with “leadsmen” who, instead of swinging a line marked in fathoms, poked at the bottom with a long bamboo pole marked in feet. No longer would they sing out to the bridge: “Six feet, sir,” indicating that there was plenty of water for our passage, although I must admit that at first such figures made me quite uncomfortable. No more would our gunners shoot at small rubber balloons taken ashore by the Gunnery Officer to be inflated at the local gas company before we got underway for a bit of practice in the area between Hong Kong and Macao; for our next targets would not be toys but fanatical “Wild Eagles” bent on our destruction. No more would we visit in Chinese homes with their friendly good-humored graciousness, their alert sons whose interest in America was insatiable, and their gentle daughters, some of whom could play on the piano practically any American popular song from “Red Wing” and “Pony Boy” to the latest sentimentality out of Tin Pan Alley.
The Canton Flower Boat was leaving her easy days behind and dropping her facetious nickname. The U.S.S. Mindanao, River Gunboat, was embarking upon a stern adventure which was to be her last. Little did she dream that in a very few days Pearl Harbor would become the battle cry of World War II, and that she herself, tossing alone a few miles from Formosa, would be the Navy’s most advanced surface unit actually underway at sea in the hostile waters of the Orient. Little did she realize that even her pitifully small armament would soon make her the most heavily gunned naval craft operating in Manila Bay, while exultant Japanese conquerors pushed hungry, exhausted, malaria-ridden Americans down the Bataan peninsula to a proud but none the less humiliating defeat. Little did she know that in five months she would meet her death in the waters off Corregidor.
As we stood out of the harbor I glanced back toward our typhoon buoy. A familiar small sampan drifted aimlessly. Three Chinese girls were waving.