Read Richard McKenna’s nonfiction and you will find that he seemed to go out of the way to find the unusual person. While at Guam, for example, he met a very old man by the name Henry Millechamp, who “was the first child born in a mixed British and American colony which had settled about 1830 on the previously unclaimed and uninhabited Bonin Islands, north of Guam.” McKenna’s description of his search for information on the colony on the Bonin Islands is an intriguing exposition on these little known, but interesting islands.
Because of his limited income, McKenna sought out secondhand bookstores. Many such stores were in Shanghai and other Asian ports. “It became one of my chief pleasures ashore,” he said, “to search out books and to look at a great many of them and to decide slowly which ones, with prices within my reach, would afford me the most enjoyment.” He carried this love of shopping for used books throughout his life. One publicity photograph of McKenna shows him at his typewriter, with a background of shelves of books, all of which seemed to be used.
While McKenna’s reading habits may have seemed a bit odd to some of his shipmates, he recalled: “The Chinese aboard the Yangtze River gunboat on which I spent several years would go out of their way to show me unusual marks of respect, although many other Americans aboard that ship were more powerful than I and in a better position to do them favors. It was the fact that I was always reading books which made extra ‘face’ for me with the Chinese.”
While at the University of North Carolina, McKenna wrote a paper on the Gold Star (AK-12) for an anthropology class. It is the finest description of the life of enlisted sailors during the 1930s. One can learn more about naval life and the attitudes of sailors in the peacetime Navy from this single short paper than from any book.
In his short stories and the work in progress at the time of his death, McKenna explored something that happened among those in the enlisted force during the Depression years and during World War II, and which was repeated during the Vietnam War. The Depression brought into the Navy’s enlisted force more educated people than ever. World War II brought an even greater influx of those with at least high school educations and many with college degrees. How some in the “Old Navy” reacted to these new men and the tensions between the two groups lie at the heart of some of McKenna’s work. One can read these fictional accounts and recognize quickly some of the tensions in the enlisted force during the Vietnam Era.
McKenna’s works should be read by anyone studying the U.S. Navy in the 20th century, and particularly the U.S. Navy in China. His feelings for those in Asia come through clearly in his novel and in some of his nonfiction writings. The Sand Pebbles is a remarkable work that shows the complexity of views on China and the Chinese by the U.S. populace prior to World War II. Further, McKenna’s enlisted men, both the good and the bad, ring as true in the 21st century as they did while McKenna served with his shipmates and later when he wrote of their exploits in the first third of the 20th century.
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.