Gunboat Diplomacy on the Yangtze
By Richard K. Kolb, VFW, April 1991
Between the world wars, duty in exotic China captured the nation's popular imagination, yet rvice there was punctuated by international incidents that often placed U.S. Marines and sailors in harm's way.
Figure 1 ‐ The USS August was hit by shrapnel on August 20, 1937 while moored off Pootung Point, Shanghai, during the Sino‐Japane War. One sailor was killed and 18 wounded. U.S. Navy Photo. In left hand corner appears the Yangtze Service Medal.
War‐tom China during the "Roaring '20s" and depression‐ridden '30s was an exciting place to most Americans. Far away and mysterious, the Celestial Empire was brought to America vicariously through stories by writers such as Marine Capt. John W. Thomason, Jr., forever linking China with the nation's military.
Perpetually convuld by civil war, this ancient land, which was discted by foreign powers, was constantly the target of outside intervention. Though the isolationist U.S. generally refrained from fig
hting, it was, on occasion, inexorably drawn into the warfare. Warlords made China ‐ from the Yangtze River Valley to Manchuria ‐ a battleground for their armies.
Bandits were always plying their trade, and the Nationalists and Communists battled for control of the country across its entire face. The most explosive element added to this mix was the Imperial Japane Army, determined to direct the destiny of all of East Asia. At various times, all the factions threatened the safety of U.S. citizens in China.
More than 10,000 Americans resided there, many running the 350 firms bad in China by the late '30s. Others rved in the diplomatic corps or carried out missionary work. Much of the commerce centered in Shanghai on the coast, the most important foreign enclave in the 5,500 mile‐long Yangtze River Valley.
Symbols of the U.S. Prence
To protect U.S. interests, the Yangtze Patrol Force (Yang Pat, for short) was officially created in 1921. (In fact, the Navy had been patrolling the river ever since 1854.) This flotilla of shallow‐draft gunboats was bad in Shanghai. The U.S. Navy's Asiatic Fleet, which was headquartered in the Philippines, stationed 13 vesls in Chine waters and patrolled inland waters with the ven‐to‐nin
e‐gunboat force.
As Adm. Robert E. Coontz (future VFW Commander‐in‐Chief), then chief of naval operations, wrote: "The Yangtze Patrol guards our interests for 1,700 miles up the river, right into the heart of China."
Approximately 1,800 sailors manned the fleet's ships and another 500 rved aboard gunboats. Marine detachments commonly rode shotgun on the craft. And amen formed armed guards aboard merchant ships that sailed interior waterways. During the two decades before U.S. entry into WWII, Marines from the states were dispatched on veral occasions to reinforce garrisons caught in various cris.
Besides the aborne rvicemen, the Army was reprented by the 15th Infantry Regiment in North China at Tientsin. In its quarter century in China, the 900‐man unit never traded bullets or lives with a foe, but was a steady symbol in the midst of the ebb and flow of constant warfare. As Lt. Col. George C. Marshall, who spent three years there, put it: "We are either just out of near trouble with the Chine or trouble is hovering near us."
Trouble, for sure, was never in short supply. U.S. forces found themlves in danger of being engulfed by violence during three parate time periods: 1926‐27, 1930‐32 and 1937‐38. Both Chin
e and Japane troops created incidents entangling neutral American forces.
Galvanized to Action
In mid‐1926, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai‐shek ordered his armies to probe the Yangtze Valley, galvanizing the Asiatic Fleet into action. On Sept. 6, Hankow was the first major city to fall: a U.S.
landing party went ashore that same day. Two destroyers had joined the gunboat flotilla of ven, and armed guards were placed aboard U.S.‐flag vesls, some of which had received sniper fire.
Throughout September, in fact, U.S. warships were fired on by Chine shore batteries. The USS Pigeon, for example, was struck over 100 times and suffered three casualties. It returned fire ‐ some 2,300 rounds. Exclaimed an executive officer: "What a relief! What a feeling after days of passive submission to indiscriminate firing."
阅读推广Early in 1927, the Nationalists launched an offensive against the northern warlords, with Shanghai as the prime objective. Marines were nt from the U.S.; the 4th Regiment sailed afire with the mistaken idea of "keeping the Communists out of Shanghai." Eventually the 3rd Marine Brigade, commanded by Gen. Smedley Butler, fielded the 4th and 6th Marines in defen of the city.
滑雪用英语怎么说Meanwhile, 160 miles in the interior at Nanking, the Navy had to rescue 52 foreigners besieged at SOCONY (Standard Oil of NY) Hill. An 11‐man guard and three Navy signalmen eventually wound up atop the hill. The latter communicated regularly with two vesls on the river. Fireman Third Class Ray D. Plumley, the only U.S. casualty of the so‐called "Nanking Incident" was wounded in the back by a Chine sniper while on his way to this strategic point. Sailors returned fire, killing two of the attacking Chine.
Figure 2 ‐ During the "Nanking Incident" of March 24, 1927, the USS Noa and its crewmembers ashore helped rescue 52 besieged Westerners from Nanking. This was the most spectacular of the Patrol's clashes in China.
Bullets continually whistled by the signalman's platform. Recalled Petty Officer John D. Wilson, "Firing was so bad that the other fellows held a sheet up against the hou and I nt my signals in front of it." For their "heroic performance under fire," all three amen earned the Navy Cross.人生的三种境界
Offshore, for the first time, U.S. guns fired at organized Chine forces along the Yangtze River. In giving the order to fire on March 24, Lt. Commander Roy C. Smith, of the USS Noa, said, "Well, I'll either get court‐martialed or a medal out of this." (He got neither.)
Over the next 10 minutes, the Noa's gunners nt 19 flat‐nod, high‐explosive projectiles howling from its 4‐inch guns. The USS Preston contributed 15 more shells. A British ship fired an additional 76 rounds.
"The headlines ‐ 'U.S. Warships in Action on the Yangtze!' – of late March 1927 were bigger and blacker than any since the USS Maine blew up in the harbor at Havana in 1898," wrote author Kemp Tolley.
Rooftop fire from the sailors combined with the ships' shells cleared the area for evacuation. By the time an Anglo‐American landing party of250 men hit the shore, the Chine were gone. One American civilian, however, was dead and two wounded.
During April and May, 25 sniping attacks against U.S. war and commercial ships were recorded. The Penguin sustained three casualties in one such incident. The last assault on a U.S. ship during this period was against the Truxton on Oct. 21.
幼儿认识数字Farther north, at Tientsin, 150,000 Chine troops clod within a 10‐mile radius of the foreign ttlement there. Marine aircraft maintained aerial surveillance over Chine troop movements, tracking retreating armies almost as far north as the Manchurian border. Several were holed by rifle
fire ‐ from passing Nationalist armies ‐ as they took off and landed at Hsin Ho. Over one and a half years, the 170 men in the three Marine aircraft squadrons marked up 3,818 sorties in missions over China.
In October, the warlord offensive was finally called off. By the end of1927, 5,670 U.S. troops were ashore and 44 U.S. warships were sailing Chine waters. This was the peak of U.S. military strength in China in the two decades before the Pacific war. Most Marines were withdrawn by the end of 1928 and early the next year the 3rd Brigade was disbanded.
Figure 3 ‐ China's enormous Yangtze River Valley was the center of Western commerce. Protecting U.S. interests at Shanghai and elwhere embroiled U.S. military personnel in veral "incidents."
Japan Enters the Fray
什么是报告For the Yangtze Patrol, 1930 was an active period. In mid‐year off Changsha, the USS Palos was peppered with 100 bullet holes by Communist gunners, wounding one sailor. It replied with 67 rounds from its 3‐inch guns and 2,000 rounds of .30 caliber ammo. On the 4th of July, the USS Guam was hit 40 times near Yochow; Chine troops killed one American. Later on, the Guam silenced Communist shore guns in another engagement.
论气节Matters took a turn for the wor when Tokyo, long envious of the Chine land mass, finally manufactured an excu to invade the empire. On Sept. 18, 1931, the Japane attacked near Mukden, launching their conquest of Manchuria. In late January 1932, when the Chine Communist 19th Route Army moved near Shanghai, the Imperial Army attacked that city. Japane carrier‐bad planes dropped 3D‐lb. bombs over the denly populated suburb of Chapei in the first wholesale air attack on civilian targets in history: 72,000 Chine were killed.
The 4th Marines held the middle ctor of the ttlement, with its front lines on Soochow Creek. To reinforce them, the U.S. Army's 31st Infantry Regiment (1,056 men‐strong) was rushed from the Philippines by February 5. The "Polar Bears" joined the "Devil Dogs" in the sandbagged machine gun nests along the creek.
日本女星排行榜
Figure 4 ‐ U.S. Marine Corps' 28th Company at Ichang Road Fire Station, Marines and "Polar Bears" of the 31st Infantry defended the International Settlement in Shanghai along the sandbagged Soochow Creek in 1932 when fighting erupted
between Chine and Japane.
Stray shells fell into the American ctor during the cour of the battle, and soldiers and Marines we
实验动物信息网re expod to fire from both warring sides. But fighting ended March 3 without U.S. casualties. When the 31st left Shanghai July 1, after five months' duty, its individual members were authorized to wear the Navy's Yangtze Service Medal.
Over the next five years, Japan consolidated its gains in Manchuria in anticipation of conquering all of China. That opportunity was created July 7, 1937, with the "Marco Polo Bridge Incident."
Japane troops attacked the Peking suburb of Wanping, thrusting across the bridge spanning the Hun River. This triggered the full‐scale Sino‐Japane War, which some historians consider the start of WWII.
