The Corps I - Semper Fi Read online

  The Corps I - Semper Fi

  W E B Griffin

  W E B Griffin

  The Corps I - Semper Fi

  Semper Fi

  PREFACE

  In 1900, with the approval of the Dowager Empress of China, a Chinese militia, the I Ho Chuan, ( or "Righteous Harmony Fists," hence "Boxer") began, under the motto "Protect the country, destroy the foreigner!" to kill both Westerners and Chinese Christians. The German ambassador in Peking was murdered, as were thousands of Chinese Christians throughout China, and the Boxers laid siege to the Legation Quarter at Peking.

  The ninety-day siege of Peking was relieved on August 14, 1900, by an international force made up of Russian, French, Italian, German, English, and American troops.

  The Imperial Court fled to Sian. Although war had not been declared against China, the "Foreign Powers" nevertheless demanded a formal settlement. The Protocol of 1901 provided, among other things, for the punishment of those responsible for the Boxer Rebellion; the fortification of the Legation Quarter at Peking, to be manned by "Powers" troops; and the maintenance by foreign troops of communication between Peking and the sea.

  As far as the Americans were concerned, this initially meant the stationing of U.S. Army troops and U.S. Marines in Shanghai, Peking, and elsewhere; and the formation of the U.S. Navy Yangtze River Patrol. The Navy acquired shallow draft steamers, armed them, designated them "Gun Boats," and ran them up and down the Yangtze River.

  The Russians, following their resounding defeat in the Russian-Japanese War of1905, had for all practical purposes turned over their interests in China to Japan. Furthermore, the Versailles Treaty, which had set the terms of the peace between the Western Allies and the Germans and Austro-Hungarians at the end of The World War of 1914-1918, had also given the Japanese rights over the Shantung Province of China.

  The reality of the situation in China in 1941 was that the lines had already been drawn for World War II. It was no secret that Japan's ultimate ambition was to take as much of China as it could, into the ' 'Greater Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere." It was also no secret that they intended to expel the British, the French, and the Americans when the time was ripe. And they most likely wanted the Italians out, too, although the Italians and the Japanese were on much better terms than either was with the French, the English, or the Americans.

  The official hypocrisy was that all were still allies, in very much the same way they had been since the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

  It had been agreed then, when the international military force was formed to relieve Peking, that they were not waging war upon China, but rather simply suppressing the Boxers and protecting their own nationals from the savagery of the Chinese.

  Thus the Japanese view in 1941, which no one challenged, was that their actions in China were nothing but extensions of what the "allies" started in 1900. The Japanese were prepared to protect all foreigners from Chinese savagery, and they expected the French, the Italians and the Americans to do likewise.

  But because the Imperial Japanese Army's tanks and artillery were doing nothing more than protecting their own, and other foreign nationals, they could logically raise no objection to the Americans or others protecting their nationals with token military forces.

  The Japanese carefully restrained themselves, with several notable exceptions, from becoming involved in incidents involving an exchange of gunfire between themselves and troops of the neutral powers. They still paid lip service to international convention, because international convention condoned their occupation of Shantung Province. If an incident came before the League of Nations, it was likely to go off at a tangent into such things as the behavior of the Imperial Japanese Army.

  Everyone understood that the Japanese prefer not to openly tell the League of Nations to go to hell. If necessary, of course, they would. But as long as they could avoid doing so, they would.

  In January 1941, the American military presence in China consisted of the U.S. Navy Yangtze River Patrol; the U.S. Navy Submarine Force, China and the 4th-Regiment USMC (both based in Shanghai); and the U.S. Marine Detachment Peking.

  Chapter One

  (One)

  Company "D," 4th Marines

  Shanghai, China

  2 January 1941

  PFC Kenneth J. McCoy, USMC, stood with his hands on his hips staring at the footlocker at the end of his bed. He'd been that way for quite some time; he was trying to make up his mind. McCoy was twenty-one years old, five feet ten and one-half inches tall, and he weighed 156 pounds. He was well built, but lithe rather than muscular. He had even features and fair skin and wore his light brown hair in a crew cut. His eyes were hazel, and bright; and when he was thinking hard, as he was now, one eyebrow lifted and his lip curled as if the problem he faced amused him. He had once been an altar boy at Saint Rose of Lima Church in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and there were traces of that still in him: There was now, as then, a suggestion that just beneath the clean-cut, innocent surface, was an alter ego with horns itching for the chance to jump out and do something forbidden.

  It was the day after New Year's, and PFC McCoy had liberty. And it was two days after payday, and he had his "new gambling money" in his pocket. So he wanted to go try his luck. But what he couldn't quite make up his mind about was whether or not he should leave the compound armed, and if so, how.

  What had happened was that on Christmas Eve at a dance hall called the "Little Club," there had been a not entirely unexpected altercation between

  United States Marines and marines assigned to the International Military Force in Shanghai by His Majesty, Victor Emmanuel III, King of the Italians.

  It wasn't the first time the Americans and the Italians had gotten into it, but this time it had gotten out of hand.

  McCoy had heard that as many as eighteen Italians were dead, and there were eight Marines in sick bay, two of them in very serious condition. Rumor had it-and McCoy tended to believe it-that there were bands of Italian marines roaming town looking for U.S. Marines. The officers certainly didn't doubt it. They'd granted permission for Marines to wear cartridge belts (with first-aid pouches) and bayonets. A sheathed bayonet made a pretty good club; a drawn bayonet was an even better personal defense weapon. But sending the men out with bayonets, sheathed or unsheathed, was far short of sending them out with rifles, loaded or otherwise.

  McCoy had not been at the Little Club on Christmas Eve, partly because a Marine who wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve by getting drunk had offered him three dollars (McCoy had negotiated the offer upward to five) to take the duty. But even without the offer, McCoy wouldn't have gone to the Little Club on Christmas Eve. He had known from experience that the place would either be depressing as hell, and/or that there would be a fight between the Marines and the Italians. Or between the Marines and the Seaforth Highlanders. Or between the Marines and the French Foreign Legion.

  Getting into a brawl on Christmas Eve was not McCoy's idea of good clean fun. And getting into any kind of a brawl right now was worse than a bad idea.

  McCoy's blue Marine blouse had two new adornments, the single chevron of a private first class and a diagonal stripe above the cuff signifying the completion of four years' honorable service. He had just shipped over for another four years, with the understanding that once he had shipped over he would be promoted to PFC. With the promotion came the right to take the examination for corporal.

  It had also been understood, unofficially, that he would get a high rating when he went before the promotion board for the oral examination. They were willing to give him that, he knew, because no one thought he would stand a chance, first time out, of getting a score on the written exam that would be anywhere close to the kind of score needed to
actually get promoted.

  Well, they were wrong about that. He wanted to be a corporal very much, and he had prepared for the examination. The tough part of it was "military engineering," which mostly meant math questions. He had a flair for math, and he thought it was likely that he hadn't missed a single question. But McCoy had more going for him. When the promotion board sat down at Marine Barracks in Washington to establish the corporal's promotion list, they paid special attention to something called "additional qualifications."

  McCoy had found out, by carefully reading the regulations, that there was more to this than the sort of skills you might expect, skills like making Expert with the.45 and the Springfield. You got points for that, of course, and he would get them, because he was a pretty good shot.

  But you also got points if you could type sixty words per minute or better. When he took the test, he had been rated at seventy-five words a minute. He had kept that ability a secret before reenlisting, because he hadn't joined the Marine Corps to be a clerk. But even that wasn't his real ace in the hole. What that was, was "foreign language skills."

  "Foreign language skills," he was convinced, was going to make him a corporal long before anyone else in the 4th Marines thought he had a chance. His mother had been French, and he'd learned that from her as a baby. Then he'd taken Latin at Saint Rose of Lima High School because they made him, and French because he thought that would be

  easy.

  When he'd come to Shanghai, he had not been surprised that he could talk French with the French Foreign Legionnaires, but he had been surprised that he could also make himself understood in Italian, and that he could read Italian documents and even newspapers. And that still wasn't all of it.

  Like every other Marine who came to the 4th, he had soon found himself exchanging half his pay for a small apartment and a Chinese girl to share the bed, do the laundry, and otherwise make herself useful. Mai Sing could also read and write, which wasn't always the case with Chinese girls. Before he had decided that he really didn't want a wife just yet-not even a temporary one-and sent Mai Sing back wherever the hell she had come from with two hundred dollars to-buy herself a husband, she had taught him not only to speak the Shanghai version of Cantonese, but how to read and write a fair amount of the ideograms as well.

  There was a standard U.S. Government language exam, and he'd gone to the U.S. Consulate and taken it. So far as the U.S. Government was concerned, he was "completely fluent" in spoken and written French, which was as high a rating as they gave; "nearly fluent" in spoken and written Italian; "nearly fluent" in spoken Cantonese; and had a 75/55 grade in written Cantonese, which meant that he could read seventy-five percent of the ideograms on the exam, and could come up with the ideogram for a specific word more than half the time.

  The guy at the consulate had been so impressed with McCoy's Chinese that he tried to talk him into taking a job with the Marine guard detachment. He could get him transferred, the guy said, and he wouldn't have to pull guard once he got to the consulate. They always needed clerks who could read and write Chinese.

  McCoy had turned that down, too. He hadn't joined the Corps to be a clerk in a consulate, either.

  The promotion list would be out any day now. He was sure that his name was going to be near the top of it, and he didn't want anything to fuck that up. Like getting in a brawl with a bunch of Italian marines would fuck it up.

  They wouldn't make him a corporal if he was dead, either, and the way this brawl was going, getting meaner and meaner by the day, that was a real possibility.

  There were two things wrong with going out wearing a cartridge belt and bayonet, he decided in the end. For one thing, he would look pretty silly walking into the poker game at the Cathay Mansions Hotel with that shit. And if he did run into some Italian marines, they would take his possession of a bayonet as a sure sign he was looking for a fight.

  McCoy finally bent over the footlocker and took his "Baby Fairbairn" from beneath a stack of neatly folded skivvy shirts. He had won it from a Shanghai Municipal cop after a poker game. He'd bet a hundred yuan against it, one cut of the deck.

  There was an officer named Bruce Fairbairn on the Shanghai Municipal Police, and he had invented a really terrific knife, sort of a dagger, and was trying to get everybody to buy them. He had made quite a sales pitch to General Smedley Butler, who commanded all the Marines in China. And Butler, so the story went, had wanted to buy enough to issue them, but the Marine Corps wouldn't give him the money.

  McCoy's knife was made exactly like the original Fairbairn, except that it wasn't quite as long, or quite as big. It was just long enough to be concealed in the sleeve, with the tip of the scabbard up against the joint of the elbow, and the handle just

  inside the cuff.

  McCoy took off his blouse, strapped the Baby Fairbairn to his left arm, put the blouse back on over it, looked at himself in the full-length mirror mounted on the door, and left his

  room.

  Their billets had once been two-story brick civilian houses that the 4th Marines had bought when they came to China way back in 1927-blocks of them, enough houses to hold a battalion. Cyclone fences had been erected around these blocks. And the fences were topped with coils of barbed wire, called concertina. At the gate was a sandbagged guardhouse, manned around the clock by a two-man guard detail.

  As McCoy walked through, the PFC on guard told him he had heard that the Wops had ganged up on some Marines and put another two guys in the hospital. If he were McCoy, he went on, he would go back and get his bayonet.

  "I'm not going anywhere near the Little Club," McCoy said. "And I'm not looking for a fight."

  The faster of two rickshaw boys near the gate trotted up and lowered the poles.

  "Take me to the Cathay Mansions Hotel," McCoy ordered in Chinese as he climbed onto the rickshaw.

  The guard understood "Cathay Mansions Hotel."

  "What the fuck are you going to do there, McCoy?" he

  asked.

  "They're having a tea dance," McCoy said, as the rickshaw boy picked up the poles and started to trot down Ferry Road in the direction of the Bund.

  As they approached the hotel, McCoy called out to the rickshaw boy to pull to the curb at the corner. He paid him and then walked down the sidewalk past the marquee, and then into an alley, which led to the rear of the building. He went down a flight of stairs to a steel basement door and knocked on it.

  A small window opened in the door, and Chinese eyes became visible. McCoy was examined, and then the door opened. He walked down a long corridor, ducking his head from time to time to miss water and sewer pipes, until he came to another steel door, this one identified as "Store Room B-6." He knocked, and it opened for him.

  United States Marines were not welcome upstairs in the deeply carpeted, finely paneled lobby and corridors of the Cathay Mansions Hotel. The often-expressed gratitude of the Europeans of the International Settlement for the protection offered by the United States Marines against both the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang did not go quite as far as accepting enlisted Marines as social equals.

  PFC Ken McCoy was welcome here, however, in a basement storeroom that had been taken over with the tacit permission of Sir Victor Sassoon, owner of the hotel, by its doorman, a six-foot-six White Russian. The storeroom was equipped with an octagonal, green baize-covered table and chairs. A rather ornate light fixture had been carefully hung so as to bathe the table in a light that made the cards and the hands that manipulated them fully visible without causing undue glare.

  McCoy was welcome because he always brought to the table fifty dollars American-sometimes a good deal more- which he was prepared to lose with a certain grace and without whining.

  In the nearly four years that he had been in China, McCoy had evolved a gambling system that had resulted in a balance of nearly two thousand dollars at Barclays Bank. He thought of this as his retirement program.

  He began each month's gambling with fifty dollars, twe
nty-five of which came from his pay (by the time they had made the deductions, this now came to about forty-nine dollars) and twenty-five of which came from the retirement fund in Barclays Bank.

  He played until he either went broke or felt like quitting. If he was ahead of his original fifty dollars when he quit, he put exactly half of the excess over fifty dollars away, to be deposited to his account at Barclays. The rest was his stash for the next game.

  Almost always, he went broke sometime during the month, and he never played again until after the next payday. But again, he had almost always put a lot more into Barclays Bank during the month than the twenty-five dollars he would take out after the next payday. And sometimes-not often- the cards went well, and post-game deposits were sixty, seventy dollars. Once there had been a post-game deposit of

  $140.90.

  As he approached the group, the bright light illuminating the table made everything but the lower arms and hands of the players seem to disappear for a moment into the darkness, but gradually his eyes became adjusted, and he could see faces to go with the hands.

  The White Russian, who claimed to have been a colonel of cavalry in his Imperial Majesty's 7th Petrograd Cavalry, was at the table. Piotr Petrovich Muller (he had a German surname, he once told McCoy, because he was a descendant of the Viennese who had been imported into Moscow to build the Kremlin) was a very large man with a very closely shaven

  face.

  He bowed his head solemnly when he saw McCoy and then gestured for him to take an empty chair.

  There was another Russian who had found post-revolution employment with the French Foreign Legion, and a Sikh, a uniformed sergeant of the Shanghai Municipal Police. There was also Detective Sergeant Lester Chatworth of the Shanghai Municipal Police, who looked up at McCoy and spoke.

  "I thought you'd be out bashing Eye-talians."