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Today, at a time when the Soviet Union looms as the most formidable potential foe of the United States, the U. S. Navy has a program for ensuring that a number of its officers are formally trained in the Russian language. Such it'rt.v not the case at all 50 years ago. as demonstrated in the edited excerpt from an oral history interview conducted 23 July 1975 by Dr. John T. Mason. Jr., of the Naval Institute. It is but one of many illustrations in the unconventional career of Admiral Tolley that there was plenty of fun to be had in the course of performing one’s duties.
While I was at the Naval Academy in the late 1920s, it appeared that the Russians would someday occupy a very important place in the world, so why not learn a little Russian? At that time, however. Russian was a non-language, and Russia was a non-country. You couldn't get a Russian grammar book in the United States. It took two or three weeks to find out where and then another couple of weeks to get one from England—a costly, outmoded, largely useless thing that was concocted years before.
Several years later. I went out to the Far East, and very early in the game. I discovered emigre Russian cabaret girls in Shanghai. I was very curious to know what they were chatting about behind my back. About that time, it seemed possible that the U. S. Navy might start a Russian course out there. They had had a Chinese course and a Japanese course for many years. So I'd gone over to see the fleet intelligence officer and asked him about it. He was a rather pompous type who said, "Well first of all. you're only an ensign, and second, you're not 25 years old, and third, if they sent anybody, of course, they'd send me."
As a result of that. I determined I would get the assignment. Fortunately, two former skippers of mine were back in Washington. 1 wrote to them, and they interceded on my behalf. They told the Office of Naval Intelligence that it couldn't find a more conscientious, studious, appropriate young man for the job. so I got it.
The Russian course turned out to be a most undisciplined and unregulated affair. Shanghai was supposed to be proper locus. There were more Russians there than any place in China, except Manchuria. One whole section of the city had the signs all in Cyrillic, and you could hear balalaika music, smell cabbage cooking, and hear cutlets frying. There were something like 50,000 tzarist emigres in China.
I reported officially to the Fourth Marines, to Lieutenant Colonel Harry "Hardnails” Schmidt, who later became a lieutenant general during World War II. Schmidt said to me. "1 don't know what to do with you. What do you want to do?"
“I want to study Russian.”
"I tell you what, you come back in three months and tell me how you made out. Meanwhile draw your pay and your mail over here." Given that freedom. I headed straight for Tsingtao and spent a delightful three months there.
Next. 1 decided that Manchuria sounded appealing. By that time, it had become the empire of Manchukuo under Japanese auspices. Of course, we maintained the fiction that it was still part of China. We didn't recognize Manchukuo. That made it convenient for everybody, because under those circumstances we could maintain a consulate general in Harbin, Dairen, and Mukden, which was a necessity, or certainly a desirable adjunct to our commercial interests out there. We did quite a bit of business in Manchuria, selling things that the Japanese needed. But under these arrangements, the Japanese wouldn't allow American military and naval attaches from the Peking embassy to go up there. However, it would have been embarrassing for them to stop ordinary visitors, and after all. a naval officer is just another American citizen for all practical purposes.
Having been warned that I shouldn't take a camera or guns and shouldn’t write down any intelligence information. I went up to Harbin which, in those days, was a totally Russian city. You didn't see a Chinese on the street. There were about 50.000 ex-emigres; lots of them had been born in Manchuria and had never seen Russia, because it had been, in effect, a Russian province before World War I and Harbin was the center of it. The rallying place for foreigners such as myself was the inevitable club, which was run along English lines. The only peculiarity of that versus the many clubs I visited all over China was the fact that you had to park your gun. I didn’t have one. but if I'd had one. like the rest of them. I'd have had to park it at the coat rack on the way in. There had been several shooting affrays when there'd been too many gin and tonics. Drinks, by the way, cost five cents apiece in those days, so you could hardly afford not to drink.
The whole society of the place was. you might say, on a constant military basis. You'd be going along the streets and hear a scream and you'd go around the corner and discover that a couple of Japanese medical orderlies in dirty white smocks had nabbed some Chinaman or Russian and were injecting him for cholera against his wishes. The Chinese had passed the word in their section that the Japanese were out to sterilize the Chinese race, and one ol the easiest and best ways to do it was to give him the proper shot. The Chinese weren't at all convinced that this was a cholera shot, so naturally there were some heated exchanges. The Russians, poor devils who were existing on 25 cents a day, had a practice which I suppose is parallel to the skid-row bums who give blood. They would go out and get shots repeatedly, get a certificate, which was sold to some Chinese who didn't want to lose his manhood. After about 15 or 20 cholera shots, needless to say. these fellows were on the ropes.
When I got up to Harbin. I had some
n;>mes that were given to me by a Russian language student whom I had re- i'eved. This was a Marine major, James F- Moriarty. who was really an extraordinary character. When Moriarty llnd a naval officer. Lieutenant Paul Card, were in Harbin they had a Japanese tail. I had one, too. The Japanese watched you every place you went until they found out what your routine ^us. So Moriarty and Card got so 'riendly with their tail that they'd even go to the toilet together. The tail wanted tH be sure that Moriarty didn’t duck out of the back window and get away 'lom him. Mo and Card invited their
tail to a party, and the object of the drill was to roll this character, get him drunk, which they thought they could easily do, and sort of look around to see what kind of a gun he carried, what papers he had in his pocket, what his identification card looked like. In other words, just play a little joke on the guy. They went through the first part of the plan, and when he passed out, they started to do the necessary search. The guy then sat up wide awake and fully competent. He said: "You see small hole on wall?" And he pointed to a small hole. Yes, they saw the hole, and he said: "Tve got camera looking
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through hole. It take pictures. Very nice party. I think maybe tomorrow you go Shanghai, first train.”
That was the end of Moriarty in Harbin. He told me this tale when I met him in Shanghai. When I tried out the names that he had given me, contacts in Harbin, the door would open a slit and a Russian face would look out, and I'd say, “Moriarty sent me," and the door would slam and that would be the end of the contact. So the word had gotten around and any friends of Mo were not friends of theirs. But I did make some friends among the Russians, and I don't suppose there were any more enthusiastic anti-communists than the Harbin Russians because they were closely surrounded.
When I first got there, it was in November, colder than hell and snowing. I took a sleigh to the Harbin Hotel, the best hotel in town. I was still shaking the snow off my coat up in my room when there was a tap on the door and a scruffy little Russian came in and asked in Russian, "Why are you here?”
I told him in Russian that I was there to study Russian. 1 said. “Come on in, take off your coat,” and I offered him a cigarette. I never smoked myself, but 1 always carried them. He was a White Russian on the Japanese gendarmerie staff and explained that he had to check up on me for the Japanese police. When he had satisfied himself that 1 had enough documents to prove that I was who 1 said 1 was or claimed to be, he got more friendly and sat down and had a cigarette, and said:
“If you're staying here some time, you'll need to know some nice Russian girls, and I can help you that way. And how about a fur coat? It's going to get very cold around here, you know, you’ll have to have a fur coat. I'll help you buy one.”
So aside from the 25 bucks a month he was getting from the Japanese, he was obviously out to make a little cumshaw on the side. Apparently. I made a pretty fair impression on him because I disclaimed a requirement for
Luigi Passano—alias Ensign Kemp Tolley—lounges in liis Shanghai apartment from which he operated his Russian language mission in China.
the fur coat or the girl and I never saw him again. He didn't tail me. Maybe I was tailed surreptitiously, but I don't think so.
In any case, during the summer, 1 had lived in a Russian boardinghouse in Tsingtao. The proprietor was a spike- driver on the Manchurian Railway, and he'd come down there and set up this boardinghouse. He had some of the stupidest houseboys who ever existed in the entire Chinese Republic. Before I got onto it, they used to send all my woolen stuff to the laundry, and it would come back about the size to fit a small boy. But the landlord was a dyed-in-the-wool Red.
I was rather interested in the Red personalities and pretended to be on the Red side, too. so I got very friendly with him. We'd drink toasts to Stalin and toasts to Voroshilov, the war minister, and so forth. So, when I was about to leave and go to Harbin, he gave me the names of some of his friends up there. He said: "I'd very much appreciate your taking this ham up to them. I might as well tell you frankly that the ham is your passport because if this ham comes from me. they know that you're my friend. 1 cured it myself and they know all about that.”
Well, I had not much more than a briefcase. I travel light. But I made room for this great big damned greasy ham, and in due course presented it to the address indicated, and became very friendly with this guy. I really wasn't up there to try to get much intelligence because I didn’t think I could, but he said: “I know what you're here for and I'll help you out.”
“Well, to tell you the truth. I'm very skittish about writing anything down.”
“Don't you worry about that. Just put down what I tell you and stop off in Tsingtao on the way to Shanghai. There’s a little Japanese shipping line that runs from Dairen to Shanghai and stops at Tsingtao overnight." In due course, he gave me a list of figures. He said. “This is the Japanese Army’s strength in Manchuria. It looks funny, doesn't it?”
“It sure does. They must have more than that.”
“Well, don’t put anything down, just leave these figures the way they are and when you get back down to Ignatius, you give him this.” And when I was ready to go, he said. “I’ve got a ham to send down to him. Be sure to tell him that this ham weighs four and a half kilograms, because I want to show him I can make a better ham than he can."
So back I went to deliver the ham and told the landlord the weight. He multiplied all the figures by four-and- one-half. and that was the number of troops in Manchuria.
I spent two months in Harbin. I had a round-trip ticket and that was the limiting factor. Besides, I was damned near freezing to death. I didn't have a fur coat, as the Russian agent said I should have. It wasjust bitterly cold, 40° below in a humid climate.
1 went back to Shanghai for the rest of the winter, and a Marine friend, who later regretted his ill-advised action, found me an apartment in a house owned by a British Army widow. She had a daughter about 18 or 19.1 guess. I'm sure the mother would have been delighted even to have her daughter stoop so low as to marry an American; things were that tough out there. At any rate, I was installed one floor over the landlady’s own apartment. I fought with and probably lost my educational campaign: my use of Russian had languished somewhat after Harbin.
Up to that point, my study had been almost entirely conversational Russian. So I needed some grammatical background because the Fourth Marines had discovered some guy who spoke enough Russian to be able to give me a written exam. That, of course, was wholly outside the bounds of my imagination in the beginning.
As a result, I got myself a prof- Meanwhile. I went under the name of Passano, because if you were an American and known to be connected with the military in Shanghai you were prey to all sorts of bloodsuckers, entrepreneurs, opportunists, and people trying to make a quick buck, but if you're some broken-down Italian on his own. obviously unemployed, barely scraping along somehow, nobody’s going to make a pass at you, not even the girls. They’re sorry for you. instead of trying to make it.
So I got a professor to teach me Russian; he was a Bulgarian from Constantinople. He was one of the damnedest mixes I think you could find outside of Constantinople. He was Bulgarian: he spoke Russian, pretty good French, Greek, and heaven knows how many other languages, and English, of course. Fortunately, he didn't speak Italian, so he wasn’t able to check up on my bona tides. But we became good friends, and he taught me not only Russian but French. We alternated. Of course, I did make Iriends with a lot of Russians, partly through him and some I’d known in Tsingtao. So we would have these tremendous parties and after two or three months, the weather started to warm up. and it seemed propitious to go back to Tsingtao.
I asked my landlady about it and she said. “No, you made a six months’ lease. You're going to have to either pay for it or stay here.” By that time, she had long since concluded that I would make a highly unsuitable son- in-law so that part had no bearing on the case.
The submarine tender Canopus, in which I had served previously, was due through about that time. I had written to some friends on board her, “How about a ride to Tsingtao?” They consented, so I invited six or eight Russians over to the apartment that evening, and we had a party where you sit down and kick your feet out in a Russian cossack dance. The next morning I got a note from the landlady, sent up by the houseboy. It is published on this page.
There’s nothing like having Russian friends in time of need.