Southeast Review of Asian Studies
Volume 33 (2011), pp. 98–115
Surviving the Japanese Invasion of China:
An Englishman in Shanghai in the 1940s
LAWRENCE KESSLER
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This article offers an account of two episodes in the remarkable career of Norman Watts
(1907–99), who lived in Shanghai from 1929 to 1950, primarily as an employee of a
British shipping rm. During the Paci c War, he was incarcerated for over two years in
a Japanese internment camp. After being released in 1945, he fought for several months
with Chinese Communist guerrillas against remnant Japanese troops.
“A Marvelous Adventure”: A Foreigner’s Involvement
with the Chinese Revolution
During the Paci c War, Norman Watts (1907–99), an Englishman working
in Shanghai, was incarcerated in a Japanese internment camp in Pudong
浦東 (―Eastern Side of the [Huangpu 黃浦] River‖) for over two years. He
was not alone, of course. Many of these internees have told their stories in
print, the best known being J.G. Ballard (1930–2009), whose semiautobiographical account, Empire of the Sun, appeared as a novel in 1984
and as a movie in 1987. After being released from the internment camp in
1945, Watts readily joined the Chinese guerrillas and fought with them for
several months against remnant Japanese
troops in the Shanghai area. This article is part
of a larger study of Watts, who is not at all
known, and his remarkable career in Shanghai
from 1929 to 1950. I met Mr. Watts on several
occasions in 1977 ( g. 1) and talked with him
about his experiences in China, which included helping Zhou Enlai 周恩來 (1898–1976)
escape Shanghai in the early 1930s and being
the rst foreigner to encounter Communist
forces when they captured Shanghai in 1949.
FIGURE 1 Norman Watts, 1977.
Watts was born in Southampton, the secPhoto by the author.
ond son of a police constable. Following in his
© 2011 Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies
An Englishman in Shanghai
99
father‘s career path, he became a recruit of the British-run Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP). He signed up for a three-year term of service and arrived in Shanghai in early December 1929 to take up his position as a constable (Bickers 1999; Bickers 2010, Mar. 23–24, Apr. 13; SMP 1930, 44).
After his rst term with the SMP ended in 1932, Watts left the force and
went to work at Holt‘s Wharf (Huo‘erte matou 霍爾特碼頭) in Pudong as a
clerk with the legendary Blue Funnel line (Lan yancong 藍烟囱), a leading
British shipping rm in Shanghai. The line was named informally for its
distinctive smokestacks, but the company that made and managed the
ocean-going liners was the Ocean Steam Ship Co. (OSS), a rm founded by
Alfred Holt (1829–1911) of Liverpool, for whom the wharf was named
(Falkus 1990, 4). Watts had a skill that was useful to Blue Funnel. As a
SMP member, he had been required to learn the Shanghai dialect, and was
thus able to supervise Chinese workers at the wharf. Watts additionally
learned Mandarin Chinese, studying rst at Aurora University (Université
de l‘Aurore, a French Jesuit institution) in Shanghai and later at Suzhou
University, where he was the only foreigner (Watts 1977a, 1–2; Watts
1977b).
Suzhou at the time was seething with angry students who felt that Jiang
Jieshi 蔣介石 (Chiang Kai-shek, 1887–1975) and the Guomindang 國民黨
(Nationalist Party), then ruling China, were not doing enough to resist Japanese encroachment, and Watts soon came to adopt their views. He discussed his politics with Tang Liangli 湯良禮 (T‘ang Leang-li, 1901–70), a
Chinese acquaintance who was editor of The People’s Tribune and chief English spokesman for Wang Jingwei 汪精衛 (1883–1944), the leader of the
non-communist left wing or Reorganization faction within the Guomindang (GMD) and a long-time rival of Jiang. It was through Tang that Watts
met Zhou Enlai, then an ―outlaw‖ as one of the top leaders of the Communist Party. One night, Tang brought Zhou to Watts‘ home in the French
Concession and asked him to help Zhou escape Shanghai. Watts agreed,
and his part in Zhou‘s escape was perhaps the most sensational and historically important aspect of Watts‘ career in China. Since I have examined this
episode in some detail in a recently published article (Kessler 2009), I will
recount it only brie y.
Zhou escaped Shanghai in late-November or early-December 1931 on a
coastal steamer of the China Navigation Co. (Taigu hangye gongsi 太古航
業公司), which took him to Shantou (Swatow) 汕頭. From there he traveled
overland to the central Soviet base in Ruijin 瑞金. Taigu was the name by
which the China Navigation‘s parent company, the British rm of Buttereld and Swire, was popularly known. Butter eld and Swire was also the
Shanghai agent for Blue Funnel, and employees of these two enterprises
considered themselves all part of the same ―company,‖ OSS. As to his role
in the escape, Watts stated he ―was the means by which Zhou got out of
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Shanghai, and I used my company‘s resources to get him away‖ (Watts
1977a, 6). His claim may be dubious at rst glance, but Zhou himself corroborated it. In a meeting with foreign correspondents in 1947, he remarked that Watts had saved his life years earlier by helping him escape
from Shanghai (Rowan 2004, 64–66). There is some question, however, as
to whether this escape occurred in late 1931 or between 1932 and 1934.1 The
answer will probably remain a mystery. Perhaps this is only tting, as the
escape was meant to be shrouded in secrecy.
Watts‘ sympathy for the Chinese revolution deepened during the 1930s.
As Japan conquered Manchuria in 1931 and moved southward over the
next several years, nationalistic sentiment in China reached a fever pitch.
Small-scale con icts between Japanese and Chinese troops nally led to
open warfare in north China in July 1937, and by August the ghting had
spread to Shanghai. When beleaguered Chinese troops were forced to retreat westward toward Nanjing in November, international shipping resumed, but Holt‘s Wharf came under de facto Japanese control. Although it
was British property, it was outside the formally recognized concession areas and therefore considered Chinese territory. This arrangement offered
Watts the opportunity to provide valuable information to British intelligence. The Japanese gave the Blue Funnel staff orders for sugar to be disbursed to various locations in China. Watts kept careful notes of the destinations and number of bags shipped. He passed this information to the
British authorities, who then deduced the location and size of Japanese garrisons (Watts 1977a, 10). Watts did not say to whom he reported, but British consular and naval of cials regularly came over from Shanghai proper
to check on matters at British companies in Pudong.
“Where the Soft Tobacco Breezes Blow”: Internment in Pudong
After Pearl Harbor, the Sino-Japanese con ict expanded into the Paci c
War and Japan went to war with the Western powers. Japanese troops, already in control of Chinese Shanghai, now took over the foreign concessions. Initially life went on as usual for Westerners, but over the next year
their position in Shanghai steadily eroded. In January 1942, the Japanese
Navy ordered foreign nationals to register at its Military Police headquarters. In March, they had to turn in any weapons, telescopes, binoculars and
radios; report on their nancial worth, real estate holdings, and moveable
goods; and get photo identi cation cards that were bordered in red to indicate their enemy national status. Beginning on October 1, they were required to wear red armbands with letters indicating their nationality: A for
American, B for British, N for Dutch, and X for other countries. The Chinese considered these armbands a badge of honor and greeted foreigners
wearing them with smiles and thumbs-up gestures (Shanghai mengguo qiao-
An Englishman in Shanghai
101
min 2006, 6; Ristaino 2001, 186–89; Carey, 1967, 34, 81; Scott 1946, 12). In
November, Japan began the process of sequestering foreign nationals in
several internment camps (jizhong ying 集中營), or Civilian Assembly Centers (jituan shenghuo suo 集團生活所) as the Japanese of cially labeled them,
in and around Shanghai (Shanghai mengguo qiaomin 2006, 5).2
The rst hundred internees at the Pudong camp arrived on January 31,
1943, and Norman Watts, then thirty- ve years old, was among them (his
intake number was P.96). Like other internees, Watts was given ten days to
gather his clothes, bed and bedding, tableware, some canned goods, soap
and other personal necessities, all of which were to be packed in no more
than four crates to be sent into camp ahead of time. An advance party of
twenty ―pioneers‖ went two days earlier to prepare the camp. These initial
internees were all men, either single, married with families that had been
sent home, or married to Asians. Later, families – but not Asians, because
of Japan‘s pan-Asia ideology – were interned as well. Watts was in the third
category, as he had a Chinese ―wife‖ (Leck 2008, Mar. 14). On the day of
internment, the men met at an assembly point in Shanghai, walked a halfmile to the Bund accompanied by cheers from thousands of spectators, took
a tender across the Huangpu, then walked another half-mile to the prison
camp (Gompertz 1967, 167–68; Carey 1967, 126–27; Leck 2006, 467–68).
The camp ( g. 2) was located at Pudong Point on a site formerly occupied by the British-American Tobacco Company (BAT), many of whose
FIGURE 2
Pudong Internment Camp. Sketch by internee Kenneth McAll
(Leck 2006, 469). Internment camp buildings are in the middle, with playing
eld, a pond, and laundry lines in the foreground. The Bund and Garden
Bridge across the Huangpu River are seen in the background.
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L. Kessler
employees also came to be interned there. The BAT warehouses had been
condemned in 1932, and the whole compound was now a mess of broken
tiles, bricks, scrap metal, and lumber. Each internee had only about fty
square feet for his bed and belongings, and the quarters were lthy, dank,
and foul smelling. A medical couple that was transferred there in September 1943 was shocked at the conditions. ―The huge, grimy, red-brick [dormitory] which loomed in sight looked like a prison which, of course, it now
was. . . . There were three storeys of it, punctuated by large and mostly broken windows patched with paper, and surrounded by a high brick wall and
barbed wire. For years since it had been condemned as a warehouse, it had
been used as a coal dump. . . . The coal dust, true to its nature, had impregnated every corner of the building.‖ Beyond the compound lay the desolate
remains of a village destroyed by the Japanese during the 1937 ghting
(McAll 1987, 46–47; Smith 1957, 103; Gompertz 1967, 169–70; Leck 2006,
467–68).
Amid these bleak conditions, the initial all-male internees (predominantly British and American) carved out a moderately livable existence.
The original hundred soon saw their number doubled with the internment
of 102 seamen from the President Harrison, an American military transport
vessel that the Japanese had captured in the Yangzi estuary (Grover 1989,
108). By March, after further intakes, the number had swollen to about
1,100. These men were a versatile and talented lot: from Shanghai came
businessmen, doctors, lawyers, journalists, college professors, and missionaries, and from the President Harrison came engineers, carpenters, cooks,
and barbers. Within several months they had cleared the compound and
village rubble. They created a sports eld (for soccer, cricket, and baseball),
vegetable plots (sporting the name ―Happy Garden‖) allocated by lot to internees, an outdoor laundry site, water boilers, latrines, showers, and an
oven with a sheet iron ―grill‖ for cooking extras to supplement camp food
(Carey 1967, 99; Scott 1946, 41–42; Smith 1957, 132; Leck 2006, 268–70,
468–70).
The demographic composition of the camp changed drastically in September 1943, when over a thousand internees in the Shanghai area were
repatriated. Consequently, Japanese authorities closed some camps and
shuf ed internees. About 350 of Pudong‘s original male internees were either repatriated or sent to other camps to provide them with more manpower. In turn, many families and some specialists whose services were
needed, such as medical personnel, were transferred to Pudong (Leck 2006,
473; Grover 1989, 113–14; McAll 1987, 44–47; Cliff 1998, 54–55). As a result, the camp now had women (some unmarried) and children (only two)
for the rst time. The remaining male internees spiffed up the place and
eagerly awaited the coming of females after many months of male companionship. A 1944 Japanese census listed a total internee population of 1,112:
An Englishman in Shanghai
103
by nationality there were 903 English, 200 Americans, and 9 Dutch, and by
gender there were 860 males and 252 females, all of the latter being English
except for a lone American (Shanghai mengguo qiaomin 2006, 8).
As at other camps, Pudong internees worked hard to create a rich cultural and social life. They established a ―library‖ with about 3,700 books
(including novels, poetry, biography, and history) that internees had
brought with them, created a ―university‖ that presented classes and lectures, organized a jazz band, and put on variety shows headlined by several
ex-vaudeville and music hall performers. The jazz band greeted the new
arrivals in September with a stirring rendition of, appropriately, ―I Can‘t
Give You Anything But Love, Baby.‖ The music hall performers came up
with this ditty:
Pootung! Pootung! [the Westerners‘ pronunciation of Pudong]
That‘s the place you‘ll always want to be.
I don‘t care if the rooms seem dark,
The Happy Garden‘s better than Jess Park [near the old Shanghai racecourse].
Pootung! Pootung!
Where the soft tobacco breezes blow,
And I bet the Park Hotel [most modern in Shanghai, across street from
racecourse]
Could never do us half so well.
Despite the dif cult situation, internee spirit was clearly quite high at times
(Leck 2006, 278, 473; Carey 1967, 9).
A cramped fty- by eighty-foot room on the ground oor of the old
BAT warehouse served as a dining hall and community center. It housed
twenty-one wooden tables and forty-two benches made by the internees
themselves and facilitated all sorts of activities. Weekday morning activities
included private study, chemistry experimentation, judo, eye exercise, physiotherapy, barbering, sewing, and shoe repair. In the afternoon the ―university‖ classes met there. In the evenings, it became a game room, a rehearsal hall for theater productions, and social center. On the weekends the
tables and benches were rearranged to accommodate a Sunday morning
church service and evening lectures or entertainment. At one weekend
dance, the fourteen black sailors who had worked in the galley of the President Harrison dressed as minstrels and entertained the gathering. They
opened with some gospel singing that spellbound the internees and then
performed the Charleston and jitterbug, which got everyone dancing
(Smith 1957, 115–16, 129–30).
On a more intellectual plane, four internees who had previously taught
in Shanghai universities organized the ―university,‖ which presented about
150 different classes on subjects such as Chinese culture and language, for-
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eign languages, history, economics, geography, chemistry, and engineering.
Lecturers spoke on a variety of special topics attended by hundreds. An
Australian began a sketching class that attracted many amateur artists
(Leck 2006, 268–70; McAll 1987, 61–62; Smith 1957, 116, 133–36). Watts
does not mention participating in any of these activities, but he was involved in his own intellectual endeavor. In camp, he befriended four scholars — three Americans and one British, only two of whom, Frederick
Drake and Frank Millican, he remembered. Drake was a British Baptist
missionary based in the northeastern province of Shandong. His lectures in
camp on church history and Chinese philosophy were reportedly very popular. Millican was an American missionary who worked for the Christian
Literature Society in Shanghai as a translator and editor. Both were Chinese linguists (Janus 2011; Crouch 1989, 352).
Watts confessed to feeling ―humbled‖ by Chinese civilization and
wanted to learn more about it from these scholars. He recalled the study
they undertook in camp:
The Japanese allowed us to take in two books only, of our own choosing. And
it just so happened that I took in two Chinese books, and these other four also
took in Chinese books, and fortunately, none of them were duplicated. The result was that we had a wonderful opportunity amongst all the misery and degradation that was going on around us to get into a little corner for several
hours a day, for three years, and study Chinese classical history. . . . We were
not allowed writing paper, and the best we could do . . . was to take the Japanese toilet paper that was issued to us as rations – thick, brown, coarse, store
paper in squares – and on this I made my notes. After the passage of three
years . . . I had a lot of notes, so much so that eventually I had a pile about
three feet high.
After leaving camp in 1945, Watts had his notes typed up and planned to
write a multi-volume history of Chinese culture based on them, but he never did (Watts 1977a, 11–12; Watts 1977b).
The Japanese had presented all internees with a set of rules, the rst
paragraph of which stated, ―The Civil Assembly Center, being the best
home for those who live in it, must be loved and cherished by all of them‖
(Shanghai mengguo qiaomin 2006, 14; Scott 1946, 31). But there was not a
whole lot to be loved and cherished, certainly not much of a material nature.
Already mentioned were the cramped, reeking quarters lled with coal dust
and vermin. Food, while plentiful at rst, was abominable. Breakfast consisted of either rice congee or cracked wheat gruel, with green tea to wash it
down. The congee was lled with husks, stones, and other foreign objects,
while the gruel was riddled with grubs, having been made from four-yearold relief supplies sent by the Red Cross. Lunch and dinner consisted of
―S.O.S — same old stew‖ made from whatever meat (usually water buffalo)
and vegetables (among them, spinach, beet root, corn) could be found, and
An Englishman in Shanghai
105
served with bread that was often sour. Internees supplemented the camp
diet with food packages sent by contacts in Shanghai via the Red Cross. As
the war dragged on and the Japanese position weakened, food supplies
dwindled. By June 1945 the evening meal was cancelled and the of cial
camp rations were down to 300 calories a day (Scott 1946, 42–43; Grover
1989, 109; Abkhazi 2002, 129).
Due to the limitations on what they could pack, internees had only a
limited supply of clothing. The Geneva Convention stipulated that prisoners be provided with clothing and shoes, but since the Japanese did not
honor this requirement, internees resorted to setting up sewing and shoerepair units (Leck 2006, 181). At Pudong, Watts was in charge of the cobbler service. He led a squad of about a half dozen men who did their best to
repair old shoes or make new ones from whatever material was available:
scraps of leather, cloth, wood, and the like. Eventually, after much prompting from the internees, the Japanese authorities agreed to let a Chinese cobbler call at camp once a month to take shoes away for repair. When the
cobbler showed up at the front gate of the compound, Watts was allowed to
take two sacks of shoes to the gate and under the watchful eye of the sentry
leave them in exchange for those already repaired. Afterwards the cobbler
would place the sacks on his tricycle cart and peddle off (Watt 1977a, 15–16).
The daily schedule of roll call and other activities, such as meals,
cleanup, and free time, varied from camp to camp in Shanghai (Shanghai
mengguo qiaomin 2006, 16). At Pudong, roll call was a twice-daily ritual.
Each morning at precisely 9:00 am the old factory re alarm shrieked, and
section leaders – the camp was divided into sections, with leaders chosen by
each section‘s internees – had exactly three minutes to get their group out
and lined up on the sports eld in proper parade order. The internees were
required to stand motionless with their feet together and hands pressed
palms inward against their sides, as the guards yelled instructions in Japanese and the internees counted off in Japanese. Internee doctors had to provide a list of those who were too ill or in rm to participate in roll call, and
the guards would check rooms and the in rmary to con rm the list, all the
while requiring those outside to stand at attention (Leck 2006, 224; McAll
1987, 51–52). The evening roll call followed a similar pattern. If anyone
could not be accounted for, as on one occasion when someone escaped, the
remaining internees ―were punished by being left in the playing eld, surrounded by guards, for the entire day. This was especially hard on the
women and children for the weather was very hot and there was no shelter.
For toilet relief women, close together, would form a circle to give those
inside privacy. About sundown we were allowed back in the buildings‖ (Laycock 1975, 126). Other group punishments might include cancelling one
daily meal, con ning internees to their rooms, cancelling letter-writing privileges, and the like (Shanghai mengguo qiaomin, 17; Abkhazi 2002, 124–29).
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Camp authorities tried to prevent internees from learning about the
war‘s progress, but to no avail. Radios were banned, but clandestine receivers were built. If they discovered these illegal sets, the Japanese would remove the perpetrators from camp and subject them to harsh punishment at
their notorious police facilities in Shanghai. Internees also frequently heard
about the outside world through the ―bamboo wireless,‖ i.e., Chinese who
would shout out information to them from the other side of the compound
walls (Cliff 1998, 149–150; Grover 1989, 110; Abkhazi 2002, 74). Also, internees could witness events from the top oors and roof of their dormitories, since the camp at Pudong Point was only 150 yards from the Huangpu
River where it makes a sharp turn south and directly across from the Bund
in Shanghai (see g. 2). In early September 1943, for example, internees
watched the Italian liner Conte Verde suddenly keel over in the river, with
its funnels, masts, and bridge facing Pudong. Residents puzzled over this
curious event. The general opinion was that Italy had capitulated to the
Allies and its crew had scuttled the ship rather than let the Japanese seize it,
which in fact was the case (Leck 2006, 470–73; Grover 1989, 112; Gompertz
1967, 169).
In the spring of 1945, internees witnessed their rst indication that the
Japanese were losing the war when Allied planes ew over the camp and
bombed the area. Several months later, on August 11, a Chinese threw a
rock over the compound wall. An attached sheet of paper contained four
characters: ―Japan defeated, peace arrives.‖ Two Chinese appeared outside
the fence to speak to their former employers, congratulating them on the
surrender of Japanese. Then employees of a nearby factory shouted that
Allied ags were appearing in the streets of Shanghai. In response, crowds
of internees went to the windows overlooking the Huangpu, and indeed
they could see that the tricolor ag had been raised at the French consulate.
While somewhat premature, the celebrations were based on Japan‘s stated
willingness on August 10 to consider surrender. The next day an American
plane ew overhead and dropped lea ets with a message stating that the
war was nearly over (Scott 1946, 70–71; Grover 1989, 134).
On August 15, the Pudong camp commandant in the company of the
British camp representative – British and American internees separately
elected one among their countrymen to act as representative – attended a
meeting at the Swiss Consulate in Shanghai. Upon their return, they gathered internees together to inform them of cially of the Japanese surrender
and that as of noon the Japanese would turn over control of the camp to the
Swiss Consulate. Immediately, the camp band began playing the national
anthems of Great Britain, the United States, and Holland as the ags of
those countries, which had been carefully hidden throughout the war, were
raised on bamboo poles. In a contrasting scene, the Japanese guards earlier
had stood facing east in full uniform with swords and white gloves to listen
An Englishman in Shanghai
107
to their Emperor‘s broadcast from Tokyo declaring an end to the war. After
the Emperor‘s formal language, which the guards did not fully understand,
had been translated into ordinary Japanese, they remained silently frozen
for fteen minutes, with heads bowed and tears owing (Scott 1946, 71–73;
Leck 2006, 391).
A few days later, the Japanese commandant and guards quietly disappeared. As Watts recalled, the internees awoke to nd the gates of the camp
open. Their usual morning siren calling them to drills did not sound, and
their guards were nowhere to be found. But leaving camp was not a simple
matter. All internees had been instructed, when told about Japan‘s surrender, to stay put until the Swiss or Allied nations could arrange for accommodations and food outside of camp. Many had nowhere to go anyway,
since their homes had either been seized by the Japanese or given to others
to use when they were interned. Some made day trips into Shanghai to see
friends or took walks in the countryside, but returned to camp at night.
The camps were not completely vacated until November (Watts 1977a, 12–
13; Leck 2006, 392; Shanghai mengguo qiaomin, 8).
The release of internees from Japanese camps turned out to be an
American operation, using the combined resources of the Of ce of Strategic
Services (a forerunner of the CIA) and the Air Ground Aid Service. On
August 19, one of the American teams arrived in Shanghai and dispatched a
plane that dropped lea ets over the Pudong camp. Three days later a delegation from the team came to check on the condition of internees. In the
following days, American planes airlifted food to the camp, dropping parcels by parachute to the excited delight of internees. As one internee at another camp wrote, ―It was a beautiful sight to watch the great B29s roaring
over the camp, . . . and the red, yellow and green parachutes opening like
some fabulous owers—as pretty as a giant rework display‖ (Abkhazi 2002,
150). Additional food, clothing, and other necessities, as well as some
pocket money, were brought in by the Swiss Consulate, Chinese friends,
local charitable organizations and businesses, and even strangers (Leck
2006, 396–97, 399; Scott 1946; Spector 2007, 9–10). But as the days of ―freedom‖ progressed, restless internees began complaining about the delay, and
some began to leave despite warnings, Watts among them. He did not state
precisely when he left the camp, but implied that he left fairly soon after
the war‘s end. Like many others, he simply walked through the open gate
(Watts 1977a, 12–13).
“Bark Like a Dog, Crow Like a Cock”:
Fighting Alongside Communist Guerrillas
A few days later, Watts was visited by the magistrate of Yangjing 洋涇 village. He was an old acquaintance, since the village, which stretched into the
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countryside just behind Holt‘s Wharf, had supplied all the coolies for the
wharf, and Watts was the rst foreigner he had met who could speak Chinese. Watts had assumed the magistrate was pro-Japanese since he had held
his post throughout the war. Amazingly, as it turned out, the magistrate
was not only an enemy of the Japanese but was also a local commander in
the Communist New Fourth Army guerrilla force.3 He asked Watts whether
he wanted to ght with his unit against the Japanese. ―Naturally,‖ Watts
recalled, ―when I met [the magistrate] after all this ill treatment from the
Japanese, I wasn‘t backward in telling him what I thought of them. And so
he said, ‗Well, would you like to do something about it?‘ Which, of course,
I did. And this is where he realized that I was willing to go out with his
guerrilla force.‖ Watts freely admitted that ―a pure spirit of revenge, . . . a
golden opportunity to exact some price from [the Japanese],‖ was his primary motive for joining the guerrillas (Watts 1977a, 12–16, 22–23; Watts
1977b).
Thus Watts joined the Chinese Communist guerrillas in the ght
against remnant Japanese troops in the Shanghai area for a few months in
the fall of 1945. It might be asked why Chinese were still ghting the Japanese despite the end of the war. When it surrendered on August 15, Japan
had 1.5 million armed troops in China, and its generals ―viewed the Communists with distaste and the Nationalists with disdain. They felt no sense
of having been defeated by Chiang or the Communist guerrillas‖ (Spector
2007, 26–39; Gillin 1983, 497–98). Furthermore, General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), supreme commander of the Allied Forces in the Paci c,
had issued an order that all Japanese forces in China were to surrender only
to Nationalist (GMD) and not to Communist commanders if they wished to
be guaranteed safe repatriation back to Japan, and to maintain order in areas they occupied until the GMD arrived. The Allies, and particularly the
United States, feared the Soviet Union and wanted to prevent the spread of
communism in China. Pursuant to MacArthur‘s order, the commander-inchief of the GMD army ordered Japanese troops to defend their original
positions and even to retake any positions lost to the Communists since the
surrender. To speed the GMD recovery of the major cities of eastern China,
the United States launched a massive airlift of its troops from bases in the
southwest. In the meantime Japanese troops, operating under GMD command, guarded railway lines and other key communication points, protected vital installations, and even patrolled the streets to maintain law and
order. The repatriation of Japanese from China did not begin until October
1945, and even toward the end of 1946 an American diplomat estimated
that there were still about 80,000 Japanese troops operating in China under
GMD command (Pepper 1999, 10; Gillin 1983, 503–04; Specter 2007, 41;
Wortzel 1999, 126–28).
An Englishman in Shanghai
109
A week after the war ended, a delegation of Guomindang generals arrived in Shanghai, which had been Japan‘s most important stronghold in
China. As it was driven to Japanese headquarters in the city in limousines
sporting Japanese ags, the delegation witnessed Japanese soldiers with
drawn bayonets lining the streets and holding back crowds of Chinese hoping to get a glimpse of representatives of their restored government. The
Japanese commander in the Shanghai area formally surrendered on September 7, but a few days later, the English edition of the Shanghai Evening
Post published a special yer carrying the headline, ―Japanese Still Rule
Shanghai,‖ and an editorial lamenting the ―amazing, disgraceful and inexcusable situation‖ by which Japanese ―with the swaggering arrogance of
conquerors‖ still ran the city. An American Of ce of Strategic Services report similarly indicated that the Japanese ―have not in any way relinquished control of the city.‖ GMD troops moved into Shanghai on September 10, and the disarming of the 100,000 Japanese troops still on duty began
on the 16th, but armed Japanese were reported roaming the streets as late as
October. At Jiang‘s request, British and American warships on September
21 moved into Shanghai harbor (Gillin 1983, 497–98; Wasserstein 1998, 21–
22; Wilkinson 1982, 21–22; Spector 2007, 39; Chassin 1965, 58; Leck 2011,
Jan. 23).
By the end of 1943, Communist leaders were convinced that the Allies
would defeat Japan and recognized that they must control central Jiangsu
province in order to jockey effectively with the Guomindang in the postwar
period. If a U.S. amphibious landing were necessary, Shanghai would be
the most obvious place for it and they could gain some political leverage by
linking up militarily with them. Or if Japan were forced to surrender without an invasion, then the Communists would be in a strong position to capture Nanjing and Shanghai. When the U.S. unexpectedly dropped atomic
bombs on Japan and the Soviets moved into Manchuria as secretly agreed
upon at Yalta, their thinking changed somewhat. On August 9, 1945, Mao
Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976) ordered all Communist armies to attack Japanese and puppet troops wherever possible, and the next day Zhu De 朱德
(1886–1976) announced Communist intent to disarm all Japanese and puppet troops in line with the Potsdam Declaration of late July (a clever move
since only the GMD and not the CCP participated in that conference). In
response, Jiang declared these directives illegal and reiterated MacArthur‘s
orders that only the GMD could disarm the Japanese and puppet troops.
But the CCP ignored Jiang and began to advance toward Japanese controlled areas. The Communists decided, however, to target only small and
medium but not large cities, because they believed the Soviets were hampered by agreements with the Allies and would not come to their aid
(Xiang 1998, 109–23; Lew 2009, 17, 19).
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L. Kessler
In the southeast, the New Fourth Army prepared to replace the Japanese in Shanghai. Communist troops ringed the city, and agents organized
workers with the intent of staging an armed uprising. But with only about
three hundred of the supposedly 50,000 organized workers armed, and with
the presence of GMD and still-armed Japanese troops backed by Allied
warships in the harbor, plans to seize Shanghai were abandoned. In September, after meeting in Chongqing with Jiang and U.S. Ambassador Patrick Hurley (1883–1963), Mao agreed to withdraw New Fourth Army
troops from around Nanjing and Shanghai. Actually, the withdrawal t in
with the CCP‘s new military strategy, summed up as ―March on the North,
Defend in the South,‖ which called on New Fourth Army guerrilla units to
concentrate into larger units both to defend the central Jiangsu area and to
link up with the Eighth Route Army to defend Shandong and other Communist held areas north of the Yangzi (Gillin 1983, 501; Wilkinson 1982,
28–29; Xiang 1998, 123–24).
While New Fourth Army guerrillas were still operating in the Shanghai
region, Watts lived and fought with one of its units for a few months, the
only foreigner among them. His immediate commander was his magistrate
friend. Watts‘ unit operated in the area south of Shanghai into the hills
around Tai Lake (Taihu 太湖) near Suzhou and all the way down to Hangzhou ( g. 3). In the Tai Lake area, pirates (who normally preyed on small
junks) fought in tandem with the guerrillas, sharing the objective of ridding China of the Japanese. Shared dangers created a bond of friendship
between them, and they often got together for drinks.
In reconstructing Watts‘ guerrilla experiences, I have re-arranged and
at times paraphrased what he told me (Watts 1997a, 16–21, 33; Watts 1997b)
FIGURE 3 Map of
area where Watts’
guerrilla unit operated.
An Englishman in Shanghai
111
for better narrative presentation, and I have quoted liberally some of his
insights about the nature and practice of guerrilla warfare. Watts describes
the ragtag nature of the unit in which he found himself:
[The unit] clothed me in this blue denim jacket and blue trousers, straw sandals, and a broad-brimmed straw hat to disguise my Occidental features. I was
very bronzed, so I did not need to have my face blackened, and often I was
taken for a Cantonese. [Being Southerners, Cantonese were swarthier, but it is
hard to believe that Watts could blend in with the Chinese since he was tall
and big-boned]. We were very badly off for weapons. Practically the only
weapons we had were those they had seized from the Japanese or those they
had made themselves. I had a Mauser pistol made in the Mukden [Shenyang]
arsenal in Manchuria, but it was faulty and every time I red it I was terri ed,
because it had been soldered together. Each time I red I thought the damn
thing would go off in my face.
As to the unit‘s objective with respect the enemy, Watts stated simply,
―harass him, kill him, and get his weapons.‖ He elaborated on the unit‘s
methods, which contrasted with those of the Red Army proper, which
stayed in garrisons and infrequently engaged the enemy:
We fought [the Japanese] every day. During the daytime . . . we lay low. We
fought mostly at nighttime [when] the Japanese always retired to their village
garrison, [usually] just a few mud huts, and they posted sentries around. And
we‘d go out in squads of ve or six, usually. Some of the men were highly
skilled in imitating animal calls: a dog barking, or cat meowing, or an owl or a
chicken, or a cock crowing. They were really very, very adept at that kind of
thing. One of [the guerrillas] would creep up ahead and get very, very close,
and then he would either bark like a dog or [crow] like a cock. Then, of course,
the Japanese sentry‘s attention was immediately diverted. He wanted to see
what was going on. He was surprised in the middle of the night. And that‘s the
last thing he knew, because we were on his back and that was the end of it. The
whole emphasis was silence. He must not be allowed to let out any cry, because
that would alarm the whole lot. And we did that without using rearms at all,
only using daggers and sharp knives. And our teaching was to attack and run,
never stay and ght. That‘s the only way we could survive, by making our attack, and immediately getting out.
Watts also spoke of the extreme discipline among the guerrillas. Before
going to China, he had served in the Life Guards of the Household Cavalry
of the British Army, where ―you had about as strict a military discipline as
you could get.‖ The Chinese guerrillas were equally disciplined in their
own way:
One had no freedom whatsoever to act on one‘s own initiative. It was all done
according to a preconceived plan. There was no room for personal initiative.
[The guerrillas] were very highly trained and trustworthy people. [When] they
were on a dangerous mission, they were away from the main armies, they were
112
L. Kessler
in hostile territory and they could not afford to be anything but utterly dependent upon each other. So every action that was taken was thoroughly discussed, and it was carried out to the letter, regardless of the consequences. In
other words, if the plan was to do a certain thing and then something went
wrong, we still carried through with what was discussed, because otherwise the
plan fell to pieces and the whole lot would be at risk. Fear wasn‘t in it at all: it
was a desperate situation, and you just went into it and you were buoyed up by
complete con dence in the men you were with. You knew perfectly well that
whatever happened, they would stay with you.‖
Naturally, Watts continued, ―Where you have a guerrilla force operating far from a central command it was necessary to have a very strict discipline.‖ He also described the constant ideological training his unit received:
A cadre (what in Russia was called a commissar) was always with the forces,
and every day, sometimes several times a day, we had to listen to what he had
to say. And one thing was prominent in almost everything, and that was, ―You
are peasants, and you have to ght with the peasants. We want the peasants on
our side, and therefore, in all your actions, always consider the peasants.‖
From time to time, things didn‘t go exactly as one wanted them to, and then
the cadre used to come along, and he would give us a little lecture on what we
should have done and what Mao would expect of us, and that‘s where he came
in. He was really the liaison man between our guerrilla force and headquarters.
These cadre were not with us on missions, but stayed behind.
Besides the cadre, his unit had ―a small force which looked after victualling, provisions . . . and an armorer, who did elementary repairs to weapons and so on. He was a bit of a blacksmith. We had a lot of homemade
daggers [that were] literally beaten out of plowshares. And he used to keep
these daggers nice and sharp, all iron, nice points on them, and always a red
cloth wrapped around to protect the hands.‖ They received provisions, such
as rice and cabbage, from the countryside where they were operating, from
farmers who approved of their attacks on the Japanese.
As the Japanese were disarmed and repatriated, and in line with the
CCP‘s new military strategy, the New Fourth Army guerrilla forces began
to regroup and return to the main army. Now that the ghting was no longer Chinese against Japanese but between two competing Chinese parties,
Watts had no cause to be with the guerrillas and returned to his work with
the Blue Funnel line at Holt‘s Wharf in Pudong.
But his ―marvelous adventure‖ in China, as he called it many years later, had not yet come to an end (Watts 1977b). A new struggle for supremacy
in China had erupted – civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists – that eventually led Watts to a different sort of rendezvous with
Communist forces. In May 1949, he reportedly had the distinction, or
perhaps the misfortune, of being the rst Westerner to experience the
An Englishman in Shanghai
113
liberation of Shanghai by the Communists. He was placed under house
arrest and expelled from China in early 1950. Fifteen years later, Watts
returned to China with a British trade delegation, and during its stay in
Beijing he met with Zhou Enlai, who remembered their brief encounter in
Shanghai three decades earlier. Zhou then accompanied him to a private
meeting with Mao Zedong. These are other stories, however, to be told
some other time.
Notes
The basis of this article is Norman Watts’ account of his experiences in China
(Watts 1977a) and my 1977 interview of him (Watts 1977b). Some of Watts’ information is dif cult to corroborate, and he can no longer provide any clari cation,
having died in April 1999 (Ancestry.co.uk 2011). Efforts to locate papers he may
have left have been unsuccessful. I am indebted to Greg Leck, whose comprehensive
treatment of the camps in China (Leck 2006) and extensive correspondence with
the author (Leck 2008–11) provided invaluable information about the internment
phase of Watts’ experiences in Shanghai. I am also grateful to Robert Bickers, who
through a series of email exchanges (Bickers 2010) rst brought my attention to
Watts’ service in the Shanghai Municipal Police and provided valuable personal
information about him.
1
Watts offered inexact dates, saying it occurred in ―the early 1930s,‖ or when he was
―a young man of 24–25‖ (1931–32), or sometime after the Japanese bombing of Shanghai
(Jan. 1932). Watts was seventy years old when we met, and he admitted that he ―could
not be too speci c because it was a long time ago.‖ In my published article, I concluded
that he was involved in helping Zhou in his well-documented escape in late 1931. New
information about Watts‘ service in the SMP makes this doubtful. Did he help Zhou
while still a member of the SMP? By ―company,‖ Watts clearly meant OSS (and by extension China Navigation), not SMP. If he aided Zhou while employed by OSS, then the
relevant date must be after December 1932, when his stint with SMP ended. By then,
though, Zhou was already in Ruijin. Could Zhou have secretly returned to Shanghai
sometime between early 1933 to October 1934, before embarking on the Long March? I
have yet to nd evidence to indicate this.
2
After Japan‘s defeat in 1945, the term commonly used in Chinese for these camps
was jizhong ying, which literally translates as ―concentration camp.‖ In English, however, it is customary to use the term ―internment camp.‖ Internees were forbidden to
use the term ―internment‖ in letters to the outside world (Abkhazi 2002, 51).
3
The New Fourth Army was founded in October 1937 as a consequence of negotiations between the CCP and GMD to create the Second United Front. It was nominally
under the control of the GMD. The army was formed by combining all the scattered
guerrilla forces that remained in south China – about 10,000 soldiers – when the Long
Marchers started on their historic trek. It was so named to distinguish it from earlier
Fourth Armies that had operated during the 1926–28 revolutionary period. The New
Fourth Army was destroyed in January 1941 in a battle with GMD forces that effectively
ended the United Front, but remnants continued their guerrilla activities in the Yangzi
114
L. Kessler
delta area up to the end of the Sino-Japanese war in 1945. For its origins and history, see
Benton 1999 and Xiang 1998.
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