Charles Ernest ‘Chuck’ Winter

Charles Ernest Winter was one of the American truck drivers who volunteered to stay outside Stanley camp to help the Medical Department in its public and community health work.

He was a Seventh Day Adventist missionary and teacher:

Mr Chuck Winter is an American Seventh Day Adventist missionary school teacher and ran a school over on the mainland near Clearwater Bay.1

This school was presumably the forerunner of today’s Hong Kong Adventist Academy and the Hong Kong Adventist College for older students, both in Sai Kung.2 Seventh Day Adventist educational efforts in south China go back to 1903, and by 1935 there was a successful ‘Canton Training Institute’ in the city now known as Guangzhou. As a result of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the school was moved to Hong Kong, first operating in Shatin. It merged with another Adventist institution to become the ‘China and South China Training institute’ and 40 acres of land were bought at Clearwater Bay. After the Japanese invasion, the school returned to Guangdong province.3 (For more on Seventh Day Adventist Schools see https://gwulo.com/node/18431)

The Japanese attacked on December 8, 1941. It wasn’t long before the British ran short of drivers, and this shortfall was made up by American volunteers,4 keen to do something to help but forbidden by their constitution to enlist in a foreign militia. Mr Winter was one of a ‘brave group’ who worked for the Medical Department and ‘drove throughout the war under shell- and machine-gun fire and continued as drivers up to the time of repatriation’.5

Mr Winter was delivering bread when he fell into enemy hands and made a spirited escape:

Charles Winter, one of our drivers, was captured. One morning as he was delivering bread to the French hospital in the Happy Valley area he was suddenly surrounded by a platoon of Jap soldiers who told him politely, ‘You are captured; prease (sic) stay here.’ Then in a hurry to join their advance they did not stop to tie him up, just left him sitting in the truck with the threat, ‘We come back.’ Winter waited just long enough for them to march out of sight beyond a bend in the road, then turned and drove like a bat out of Hades back to town.6

After the surrender (December 25, 1941) and internment of most ‘white’ Allied civilians (January 21, 1942) Mr Winter and his fellow drivers agreed to stay outside Stanley to carry on their work. Patrick Sheridan, an RASC baker, who was initially held in the Exchange Building with my father and two other bakers, describes the situation in early January 1942:

The Japs have allowed a sort of Medical or Health Dept. to be set up to help the local hospitals and homeless refugees of many nationalities. The man who formed it is the former Director of Medical Services of Hong Kong, a Dr Selwyn-Clarke. He has the assistance of a Mr Owen Evans, an Englishman, and two Americans – a Dr Henry DD and a Mr Chuck Winter. They have an ambulance and operate very much like the International Red Cross.7

After the surrender, the Medical Department seems to have regrouped at Queen Mary Hospital in Pokfulam:

Evans, Winter and Doc Henry were formerly based at the Queen Mary Hospital but the Japs took it over for their own sick and wounded and turned everybody out. They are taking over all the best and modern hospitals for themselves and not concerned where the patients go when they throw them out.8

American writer Emily Hahn, who was sheltering there with her baby, dates the expulsion to January 20 or 21.9 The Japanese wanted the uninterned Medical Department personnel all to live under the same roof, and the next we see of them, they’re in St Paul’s Hospital (aka the French Hospital) in Causeway Bay, which had a huge ‘compound’ of associated buildings, including one of the island’s two French Convent Schools:

Evans and co. are now accommodated at the French Hospital at Causeway Bay. They live in the former girls’ school in the Convent grounds.10

The bakers joined the drivers there on February 8,11 and Mr Winter’s work brought him into regular contact with them:

We are now producing bread for all the Hospitals including Bow(e)n Road Military Hospital and also some for Stanley Internment camp. Evans(,) Winter and Doc Henry bring us supplies of materials. They also collect and distribute the bread, and ferry the bakers to and from the Bakery. They also distribute milk, rice, beans and fuel to the Hospitals. In fact they are three conscientious, hard-working, unselfish men.12

Mr Winter was involved in one of the earliest documented episodes of smuggling by outsiders into Stanley Camp:

{Captain}Tanaka13 hands out another kindness, he sends for Mr Evans and Chuck Winter and tells them to load the ambulance with food stuffs, i.e. tea, sugar, butter, tinned goods etc. and take it to the Beach Hospital for the patients. This is a godsend as they have been living on a small rice ration and a slice of bread a day. Evans and Winter manage to smuggle some of the food into Stanley Camp where it is needed just as badly.14

This must have been before February 8 when the bakers were living at the Exchange Building with Captain Tanaka in charge. Mr Winter continued to drive into Stanley with bread baked at the Ching Loong Bakery in Wanchai:15

Evans, Chuck Winter or Doc Henry make a daily trip to Stanley internment camp to deliver bread, milk, etc. 16

Bread deliveries to Stanley were gradually replaced by an internee flour ration in April/May 1942 but the drivers continued to take bread to the hospitals.

The drivers didn’t always find their work easy; we hear of another team of drivers (former American pilots living in May Road) getting rough treatment and slaps during Japanese searches, and this almost certainly happened to the French Hospital group as well:

{Charles} Schafer and four other American citizens managed to escape internment by securing passes to work for the Hong Kong Medical Dept. During the next six months, they trucked 350 cubic tons of food and supplies to the internees and 800,000 lbs of firewood to Hong Kong’s hospitals. But though they had a form of freedom, they never knew when they would be slapped or kicked, or their loads confiscated by the Japanese. Once, a guard slapped Schafer so hard his head rang for hours. They lived on the internee’s rice-beans-salt rations, and managed to avoid catching beriberi only by buying other foods outside at enormously inflated prices.18

Mr Winter made a mark on life at the Hospital that survived his repatriation:

Conditions at the French Hospital are not bad, and as we make friends with the young children and the older girls, Chuck Winter introduces games of soft ball in the evenings before it gets dark. There are ten small children of various nationalities aged between 6 to 11 years, four older girls aged about 16 to 20 years.19

Henry Ching, the young son of the former editor of the South China Morning Post, remembers joining in these games in 1944.20

We get a final glimpse of Mr Winter in early June, 1942 as Staff-Sergeant Sheridan is about to make his escape from Hong Kong (for which he was awarded the Miitary Medal):

I say farewells to Dr Selwyn-Clarke, Dr. Henry, Chuck Winter and Mr Evans and hope they will be able to continue the fine relief work they are doing.21

On June 29, the day of my parents marriage, the Americans in town were driven to Stanley to board the repatriation ship, the Asama Maru. In late July they were transferred to the Swedish ship the Gripsholm for the rest of the voyage home. On August 18, Charles Winter, still on the Gripsholm, typed a letter to my father’s parents in Windsor. It was the first news they’d had of his survival, and it also told them of his marriage.22

My knowledge of Mr Winter’s activities after the war is sketchy in the extreme. At some point he became the chair of the Department of Microbiology at Loma Linda, a Health Sciences university in Southern California with Adventist affiliations (https://library.llu.edu/heritage-research-center/egw-estate-branch-office/seventh-day-adventist-biography-file?combine_op=contains&combine=&order=field_search_notes&sort=desc&page=53.) In 1963 he was Activities Committee Chairman (https://scholarsrepository.llu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=scope)

That’s all I know at the moment, but I hope to learn more in future. This is the letter that Mr Winter wrote to my grandparents from the Gripsholm. It tells us that his first destination in the US was Homer, Minnesota;

 

Notes:

1Patrick John Sheridan, Hong Kong Memoir (unpublished), 89.

2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Adventist_Academy

3http://www.hkac.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=16&lang=en

4https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/thomass-work-6-more-on-the-delivery-drivers/

5Norwood Allmann, Shanghai Lawyer, 1943, 265. See also http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2206&dat=19420913&id=MQYtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=T9QFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4602,2075440

6Allmann, 1943, 266.

7Sheridan, 88.

8Sheridan, 88.

9Emily Hahn, China To Me, 1986 ed., 307-308.

10Sheridan, 89.

11http://gwulo.com/node/9906

12Sheridan, 88.

13https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/thomas-and-tanaka-2-the-man-in-the-photo/

14Sheridan, 91.

15https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/how-the-bakers-started-baking-again-after-the-surrender-2-return-to-the-qing-loong/

16Sheridan, 93.

17Sheridan, 100.

18 Ian Johnson, in a Pan-American in-house journal of 1942 – passed on by Tony Banham

19Sheridan, 94.

20http://gwulo.com/node/13010

21Sheridan, 105.

22The letter can be read at https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-edgar-some-documentation/

Seventy Years Ago Today: A Personal Account

Not long after 2 pm. on October 29, 1943 – seventy years ago today – 33 lives were brought to a brutal end on Stanley Beach.1

32 men and one woman were executed by beheading. Their trial had been held in two sessions on October 19, and the interpreter provided by the court made little effort to convey to the prisoners what was going on, but at one point he did offer a rather feeble English summary of the proceedings. William Anderson, the Stanley Camp Quartermaster and one of those in the dock during the afternoon session, was able to pick up the gist of the accusations:

Anderson’s understanding was that it was primarily to do with the prisoners hindering the Japanese in bringing about a new order in Asia.2

Yes, indeed. They had all done so through contact of one sort or another with the resistance organisation, the British Army Aid Group. Most had been agents, but the one military man who was executed on October 29th, Captain Mateen Ansari of the 5/7 Rajputs, had been a POW in Ma Tau-wai Camp and some of those who died beside him had been caught when a plan to free him was betrayed.

By the end of October 19, 33 people had received the death penalty; the rest, including William Anderson, got 15 years – this was simply a slower death sentence, even when it was reduced to ten later, as conditions in the Kempeitai jails were so bad that British prisoners who came out after two years were barely clinging on to life even though they’d received extra rations both openly and through smuggling. But happily most of this group were alive at the end of the war – although not David Edmondston, the number two at the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, who died of malnutrition and medical neglect in 1944.3

Like so many others my parents made the decision not to pass on the burden of suffering by telling their children about what happened to them during the war; my mother occasionally spoke about the (relatively!) lighter side of things – for example, finding a centipede in her shoe and calling my father to kill it – while my father was occasionally forced by the pressure of emotion to speak about his grimmest experiences.

It was clear to me even as a child that for him the worst time of the Hong Kong war was not the hostilities, with their constant threat of sudden death from the incessant shelling and frequent air raids, but the occupation that followed. And it wasn’t the hunger, the cramped conditions, the lack of decent sanitary and washing facilities, or the restricted life he was forced to lead that had scarred him the most: it was the fear of the Kempeitai.

No wonder. To be arrested by the Gendarmes was to enter a world of deprivation and terror that it’s hard for those of us who have known only peace-time conditions to even imagine. The cells themselves were torment enough: prisoners were packed tightly into rooms far too small for their number, the stench was foul – one or more of them was almost certainly suffering from dysentery – and it was not unknown for newcomers to find themselves forced to squeeze in next to the corpse of a poor wretch who had succumbed to mistreatment and neglect. In the Happy Valley Gendarmerie – where my father would probably have been taken if arrested during his time of greatest risk4 when he was outside Stanley, living in the French Hospital in Causeway Bay and baking bread for the hospitals – no bedding was provided – you had to wait for a cell-mate to die, be transferred or released.5 Some cells had natural light, others didn’t.

The food, as I’ve already indicated, was not enough to keep anyone alive for long: it seems to have varied at different times and in different prisons, but I think that a typical daily ration would be about 12 ozs of rice, salt, and a little vegetable marrow. But the inmates couldn’t expect even this much food to be served regularly: the gendarmes used starvation to ‘soften up’ prisoners, so interrogation would often take place when the last meal was nothing but a distant memory; sometimes longer periods of food deprivation were applied.6 For similar reasons, at least one prison was kept deliberately cold. In most cases prisoners were expected to spend much of the day cross-legged, silent and staring at a wall. Beatings were handed out for the slightest deviation.

And those already enduring these unendurable conditions lived with the pain of previous interrogations and the fear of future ones. I do not intend to describe these hideous occasions in any detail; suffice it to say that a session might begin with a beating (an amazing variety of objects were used for this) and proceed to worse measures if this failed to get the desired co-operation.

It’s probable that most or all of the people who died on October 29 had been interrogated under torture. I argued in a previous post7 that in general the Kempeitai, although brutal, treated ‘European’ prisoners with a great deal of procedural scrupulosity: they were not routinely tortured, but they almost always were if they were suspected of spying, and there’s evidence that the severity and extent of the brutality depended on the degree of involvement in espionage suspected by the interrogators. Most of those dying seventy years ago today were not ‘European’  and those who were, had taken part in activities such as military espionage, the operation of secret radio sets, and the passing on of messages, some of which were from the BAAG.

The 33 who died reacted differently to this ordeal. Two are known for certain to have been unbreakable and to have told their tormentors nothing – I think it highly probable that many more also said nothing of any value to the Japanese, only admitting to what was already known, trying to give the impression of providing information without putting anyone else at risk. We can be sure that, whatever was wrung out of them, almost nobody told everything they knew: there were many people involved in resistance whose activities were known to some of these prisoners, who were never arrested. Only one man is believed to have broken completely and attempted to spy on his fellows for better conditions and in the hope of a reprieve (which was not granted). Those who are certain they would never have done the same may wish to condemn him.

Most of those who died seventy years ago today had been arrested in the period from late April to late June – as far as I know at the moment Charles Hyde was the first and Thomas Monaghan the last, but I have very little information about the arrests of the non-Europeans. The main investigations ended around August 19.8 After that, the prisoners were probably left to await trial and then the carrying out of the sentence.

At about 2 pm on October 29 the condemned were taken out of solitary confinement and assembled inside Stanley Prison. They were refused a visit from a priest, but were allowed five minutes together to compose themselves. Captain Mateen Ansari gave an impromptu talk:

We will die strong and healthy for an ideal; not as traitors but nobly in our country’s cause.9

Wong Shiu Pun, who had worked at St. Paul’s College, led prayers. Then it was time to go.

The prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs and were roped together in groups of three. They were taken to the prison’s administration compound and put into the large prison van.10 They set off on the short drive to Stanley Beach soon after 2 pm; the blinds were pulled down, and the van was followed by two Japanese staff cars.

The American Chester Bennett was briefly interned in Stanley before being released to buy extra food for the Camp. War reporter Hal Boyle tells the next part of the story from Bennett’s perspective:

He gave the note ((a final message to his wife)) to a friendly guard and soon it was time to go. The crowded black van pulled out from the steel gates of Stanley Prison and moved slowly down the rough, narrow road leading to the small bay where British redcoats had planted the empire flag more than a hundred- years before.

As the van passed a number of internees toiling up the slope someone put his face up to the rear wire grill and called out: “Goodbye boys. We shan’t be seeing you again.” ((Believed to be Scott or Fraser.))

At the bottom of the hill the prisoners were forced to dismount and follow a trail winding around the edge of the bay. It must have been torture at every step to Chester Bennett. Rope burns on his left leg had become badly infected, the leg had become gangrenous and needed amputation. But he walked upright and limped only slightly. To all outward appearances he was utterly calm. The prisoners marched in single file to a small clearing. Ringing the hills around them were scores of Chinese gravestones. Before them in the center of the clearing the prisoners saw two trenches dug by Indian warders and knew how they were to die.11

They were all blindfolded. Captain Ansari, Walter Scott and John Fraser were led forward first. The others followed, also in groups of three. The whole business lasted about an hour. The beheadings began, but the executioner tired and the swords lost their sharpness: some of the victims had to be finished off with bullets – some internees heard the shots and believed that the prisoners had all been executed by firing squad. Anne Ozorio describes the unflinching demeanour of Wong Shiu Pun as these dreadful events were playing themselves out:

By the time it came to him the swords were blunt. But he kept praying.12

There was no intention on the part of the executioners to cause their victims additional suffering; just incompetence and indifference.

There were 33 victims in total: seventeen Chinese, eight British, four Indians, one Canadian, one American, one Portuguese, one Eurasian. 32 were male; Lau Tak Oi, the wife of resistance leader David Loie, was the only woman.13

After it was all over, the Indian guards filled in the graves, while the Japanese became very serious, and bowed deeply as water was sprinkled on the graves. Then they returned to the prison for a raucous celebration.14

October 29, 1943 was one of the few war-time experiences my father spoke to me about. He could obviously never forget this day on which he was with Mrs Florence Hyde while her husband Charles was being executed on Stanley Beach. He was, I now believe, part of a quickly improvised plot to keep her from leaving the bungalow: the part of the beach where the executions were taking place would have been visible from the path outside.

My father must also have felt a strong affinity with another of the brave men who went to their deaths seventy years ago today – his fellow Lane Crawford employee Frederick Ivan Hall. Mr Hall was in the company butchery department and at some point was living almost next door to my father in Morrison Hill Road (they probably had company flats). They were both also in the Lane Crawford bowls and cricket teams. And both had married Eurasian women earlier in the occupation.

 

He also knew one of the radio operators in the execution party – either Douglas Waterton or Stanley Rees. He wrongly believed that this man was falsely charged. He was wrong: both Mr. Waterton and Mr. Rees had been part of a team that monitored the news and passed on important items to John Fraser, the co-ordinator of most of the resistance activities in the camp.

The events of that day still haunted my father more than twenty years later. Why bring them back now? There are many reasons, one of them to me absolutely compelling.

While awaiting execution Douglas Waterton scratched a calendar on the walls of his cell – every morning he wrote the date and crossed it out –

‘EXECUTED DATE CALENDER STOPS’.

Mr Waterton also recorded some basic facts:

ARRESTED STANLEY CAMP JULY 7 1943
COURT MARTIALLED OCTOBER 43 AND CONDEMNED DEATH
NO DEFENCE

His fellow prisoner, William John White, did something similar: he inscribed all the names he knew of the condemned with sometimes a little information – for example, after Alexander Sinton’s name he put ‘SD’ for Sanitation Department. 

These men, and I’m sure the 31 others who died alongside them, wanted their story to be told. In the grimmest of circumstances, with all hope of survival gone, they began the process of historical recording that those of us who live in the world made possible by their courage and sacrifice must continue in humility and gratitude. 

1 For some of these people see:

Alexander Christie Sinton

Thomas Christopher Monaghan’s Resistance Work

Charles Hyde’s Resistance Work

Chester Bennett – ‘The American Hero of Hong Kong’

Lau Tak Oi (Gladys Loie)

2 George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 182.

3https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/1944-4-two-deaths-a-move-and-a-release/

4February 1942 to May 1943.

5http://gwulo.com/node/8235

6https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/part-4-of-hal-boyles-series-on-chester-bennett/

7https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/how-did-the-kempeitai-treat-british-civilians-in-hong-kong/

8Wright-Nooth, 1994, 177.

9 Wright-Nooth, 1994, 186.

10Wright-Nooth, 1994, 186.

11https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/part-4-of-hal-boyles-series-on-chester-bennett/

12https://www.facebook.com/groups/308617469269780/

13https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/the-executions-of-october-29-1943-update/

14Wright-Nooth, 1994, 187.

 

Thomas’s Work (6) More on the Delivery Drivers

In a previous post[1] I wrote about the courageous truck drivers who worked for the Medical Department in the first half of 1942, delivering supplies to the hospitals, including the bread baked by Thomas and his fellow bakers. I’ve sometimes wondered why, with one exception, they were all American. (The exception, Thomas and Evelina’s best man, the Britisher Owen Evans, had early worked as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Sino-Japanese War, so he was an obvious choice).

It seems that Americans had already taken over transport duty during the fighting (December 8-25) because the network was in danger of collapsing due to the defection of many Chinese drivers, some of whom were fifth columnists, perhaps infiltrated into Hong Kong by the Japanese amongst the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Sino-Japanese War who flooded into the colony after the conflict came close to the Hong Kong border in late 1938. Others probably didn’t see why they should risk their lives driving through shell fire and air raids for a racist imperial system. In any case, the defections left many gaps to be filled.

In a report to the American consul general in Hong Kong, quoted in the Miami News of September 13, 1942,[2] N. F. Allman, Provost of the American Internees’ Council at Stanley said:

During the war the transport of the medical department very soon began to fail. Likewise, the transport of the food control. The transport of both these departments was virtually taken over, reformed and kept going by American civilian volunteers.

Not all the Americans who worked with Selwyn-Clarke after the surrender were in place during the fighting, but it seems that some of them were, and there was already a ‘tradition’ of American drivers. It seems that although Americans are not absolutely forbidden to join foreign militaries (at least not today[3]) they are strongly encouraged not to, so voluntary service as a driver was obviously a popular option for those who wished to play a part in the defence of Hong Kong. They would have been particularly welcome because before the war the military had refused to withhold Europeans from the Volunteers to act as drivers, claiming that the length of the line they had to guard meant that not a single man could be spared for this service (M. F. Key, cited in John Luff, The Hidden Years, 1967, 134).

Charles Schafer remained behind to the last minute in Hong Kong to help wind up the affairs of the China National Aviation Corporation, a Chinese airline, but also an affiliate of his company, Pan Am. As the Japanese stormed into Hong Kong, CNAC managed to get a few transport planes into Kai Tak airport (all the planes there had been destroyed on the ground) and ferried many important Chinese politicians and officials, including Madame Sun–Yatsen, to safety in Chungking.[4] When Kai Tak Airport was finally destroyed by the British, any possibility of escape for Shafer disappeared. He caught the last ferry from Kowloon to the Island and joined a British medical detachment.[5] After the surrender he continued his association with the Medical Department, ending up working in Dr. Selwyn-Clarke’s team:

He (Selwyn-Clarke) immediately contacted the head of the Japanese medical service and offered the full support of his staff. He asked for passes for the doctors and for the truck drivers who would supply food and fuel for the hospitals and these were granted.[6]

In another deposition, he referred to himself as part of ‘Selwyn-Clarke’s motor corps’.[7] It seems that these drivers might have delivered wood as well as bread and medicines.[8] The Miami News article also has them moving hospital patients and driving Red Cross trucks (although whether these trucks belonged to the Red Cross before they were used by this team is another question).

Shafer and fellow driver Albert Fitch were involved in a daring piece of smuggling when the Americans were repatriated. The leader in this operation seems to have been John Morton. Thanks to these men (and unnamed helpers) the entire financial records of the Hongkong Bank’s last day of operations before the Japanese takeover were hidden in a typewriter and taken out of Hong Kong. Morton, Shafer, Fitch and other Americans preparing for repatriation gave a list of items they wished to take with them onto the ship to Mr. Oda of the Japanese Foreign Affairs Department. Most of the items were chosen so as to guarantee refusal – camers, trunks, radios and so on. They rightly reasoned that having said no so many times, Oda would nod through typewriters. The group purhased some identical models, and John Morton carefully secreted the Bank records – ‘typed on the thinnest onion-skin paper you could imagine’ – inside his. At one point, all seemed lost when a second round of searches led to the confiscation of all the typewriters on the grounds that Fitch had put some carbon paper into his and the typing visible on this was thought to contain coded messages. Luckily they found Mr. Oda who managed to over-ride the Army confiscators and just before sailing they saw a tug  transferring the typewriters on board:

Albert Fitch was, I think, as young as I was, but he was impetuous. He wanted to go right down and demand the typeriters, right then; but we restrained him.

Five days later the typewriters, hidden records intact, were restored to them. (Alan Birch and Martin Cole, Captive Years, 107-110)

Florida resident Eugene Pawley was another driver who was formerly with the CNAC and found himself stuck in Hong Kong. Rather surprisingly, he didn’t have high enough priority to get on the CNAC evacuation flights so was forced to stay behind in occupied Hong Kong.[9] This lack of priority is a little surprising because Eugene was the brother of William Pawley, the President of CNAC. With William and the third brother, Edward, he was involved in the setting up of the famous ‘Flying Tigers’ unit of American airmen, volunteers who helped the Chinese resist the Japanese in southern China until America itself entered the war.[10] Edward Pawley and his wife Idah were friends of the writer Emily Hahn, who mentions them a number of times in her memoir China To Me.[11] Eugene Pawley arrived in China in 1939 and after repatriation in late June 1942 eventually headed the China Desk for the Office of Strategic Services.[12] William Pawley became Ambassador to Brazil after the war; he seems to have been involved in promoting CIA (successor to the OSS) covert operations against Castro, and one conspiracy theorist has even suggested he put up the money for the assassination of John Kennedy!

It seems that another CNAC employee Max Lessner, who’s not in Gwen Dew’s list, was also a driver, but one who was allowed to leave for Macao in March.[13] Lessner was a Rumanian with business experience in China who eventually became Pan American’s airport manager at New Delhi.[14]

A fourth driver, Carl Neprud, was born in Coon Valley, Wisconsin in 1889. His old university,Wisconsin (class of 1912) provides some general biographical details:

(Neprud) was taken into the Chinese Maritime Customs in 1913 with which service he has been connected ever since. He has been stationed in different parts of China and held different posts such as appraising commissioner in Shanghai, tariff secretary and more recently, (since the war) as liaison officer between occupied and unoccupied China.[15]

The same source tells us a little about his work during the war:

During the war he and his group supplied First Aid for civilians (and soldiers in many cases) so he got to the front lines rather frequently…Living in a strong granite building on the waterfront he was across the bay from the Japs on the mainland, and at one time counted 14 Jap “hits” on the front of his building.

The description of the events after the fighting suggests that he wasn’t the only one of the American drivers to have been working for the Red Cross during the fighting:

After the surrender as the Jap army of occupation moved into Hongkong, Neprud and other members of his committee were allowed to operate for the relief of the civilians, as the Jap military had no machinery set up to care for civilians.[16]

It seems that the June 29/30 repatriation came as no surprise:

 Neprud early had the feeling that the American civilians would be repatriated soon, because the Japs would want their own people back. In each drive the Japs would pick a land wherein English was spoken, and their own people who had lived in America would be tremendously useful in translating documents.

But it seems there was still more to Carl Neprud. The St. Petersburg Times for October 24, 1943 reported:

As an agent of the Chungking government for several years, Neprud disguised himself as a city health service ambulance driver when the Japs invaded Hongkong for fear that he would be recognized.

So Neprud was one of those who hoped to get out of Hong Kong before the Japanese discovered who he was. My guess is that Eugene Pawley felt the same way, as he must have been nervous about the possibility of the occupiers getting to know of his family’s connection with the Flying Tigers.

Neprud continued his association with the Nationalist authorities:

 A Chungking agent for commercial and financial affairs in the Orient, Neprud is still representing the Chungking government at Washington, D.C., studying tariff and trade matters.[17]

This article in the St. Petersburg Times reports Neprud’s 1943 plan to drive the Japanese out of China with 500 planes. [18]

He was appointed to Economic Cooperation Administration[19] Mission to Austria in October 1951 and died in October 1976.[20] His daughter became a pioneer woman stockbroker.[21]

These drivers (with the exception of Lessner) are mentioned by Dew but not in Thomas’s 1946 article in The British Baker, which might mean that they were not very involved in delivering the bread he was baking in the Qing Loong Bakery. I’ve not as yet been able to find out any more than is contained in my original post about his best man, Owen Evans. Another American, Charles Winter, in the letter he wrote to Thomas’s parents, mentions his pre-war work with the Medical Department, but I’ve not been able to find out in what capacity. He might have been one of the ‘committee’ (see above) who worked alongside Neprud in the fighting and continued to drive for the Health Department after the surrender. I can find no other trace of  Dr. Robert Henry. Thomas calls the latter ‘Dr. Henry’ and the first name comes from Gwen Dew (and is confirmed by the Miami News article). Emily Hahn mentions ‘Dr. Jim Henry’ as President of the American-staffed Lingnan University, but it’s unlikely to be him. Research continues, and I’d love to hear from anyone who has more information about any of these men.

Update:

Elizabeth Ride has kindly sent me a June 1942 letter from her father, Lindsay Ride, the founder of the resistance organisation the BAAG, to Dr. Court, a contact in the French Hospital. In it there is an interesting reference to two of these drivers:

Will you kindly tell the bearer where he can find GENE PAWLEY and ALBERT FITCH who are supposed to be driving supply trucks. I have a message from Ed Pawley who wishes his brother Gene to come out…

Colonel Ride goes on to urge Court to make up a party with the two Americans and assures them they’ll be well looked after. But by this time the Americans were on the brink of repatriation, and Court never ‘came out’. He wasn’t one of those arrested at the French Hospital on May 2, 1943, though, so it seems that his contacts with the BAAG remained undetected.

Another document supplied by Elizabeth Ride confirms that only Dr. Henry, Charles Winter and Owen Evans delivered bread to the hospitals. It also contains something about Owen Evans that’s so interesting it deserves a post to itself.

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[1] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/thomass-work-3-outside-stanley/

[2] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2206&dat=19420913&id=MQYtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=T9QFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4602,2075440

[3] http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_780.html. John Luff (The Hidden Years, 179) claims American men were legally forbidden to serve with the Hong Kong Volunteers, which may well have been the case as the conscription order of July 1940 was undoubtedly nationality specific. The current US position seems to be that their nationals are liable to call-up under the laws of any country they’re resident in, but should do their best, within the law, to avoid such service.

[4] Charles Drage, The Life and Times of General Two-Gun Cohen, 1954, 285; //http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Aviation_Corporation

[5] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2206&dat=19420913&id=MQYtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=T9QFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4602,2075440

[6] Quoted in Alan Birch and Martin Cole, Captive Years: The Occupation of Hong Kong 1941-45, 1982, 24.

[7] http://www.cnac.org/schafer01.htm

[8] http://www.cnac.org/schafer01.htm

[9] http://www.cnac.org/wings_over_asia_v1.pdf

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Pawley

[11] E.g. 180-181 (1986 ed.).

[12] http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wRY7DPPKYXcC&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=eugene+pawley+oss&source=bl&ots=7SD-CKK6sA&sig=9bpdtGTIWsF0itIo8SF9a1aVpAM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SJWGT4-0Bo_98QPmz-XvBw&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=eugene%20pawley%20oss&f=false

[13] http://www.cnac.org/lessner01.htm

[14] http://www.cnac.org/lessner01.htm

[15] http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/UW/UW-idx?type=goto&id=UW.v44i2&isize=text&submit=Go+to+page&page=104

[16] http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/UW/UW-idx?type=goto&id=UW.v44i2&isize=text&submit=Go+to+page&page=113

[17]http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19431024&id=BrtSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=En0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=2501,1979906

[18] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19431024&id=BrtSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=En0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=2501,1979906

[19] An organisation involved in implementing the Marshall Plan.

[20] http://scdb.swem.wm.edu/wiki/index.php/Carl_Neprud

[21] http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1988-04-26/news/8801260452_1_shanghai-japanese-school-board