Diplomats in Blue: U.S. Naval Officers in China, 1922–1933

Preface

Preface The roots of this story of the U.S. Navy in China extend back to my birth into a naval family in March 1918, when my father, Frank Alfred Braisted, was serving with American destroyers operating against German submarines out of Queensland (now Cobh, having reverted to its former name), Ireland, and my mother, Margaret Buzard Braisted, was living in the home of my grandfather, William Clarence Braisted, then Surgeon General of the Navy. Four years later my father commanded the destroyer Hulbert in the Asiatic Fleet. Always eager to follow my father at sea, my mother embarked with me and my twentythree -year-old cousin, Gertrude Bradshaw, on the Army transport Thomas in San Francisco. The passage from San Francisco to Manila required thirty-one days with only brief stops at Honolulu and Guam. Our lives were governed by the movements of the Asiatic Fleet, which spent the winter in Manila Bay, the summer in Chefoo on the northern coast of Shantung province, and spring and autumn moving between North China and the Philippines. Fortunately, there was a cool retreat at Baguio , five thousand feet up in the mountains of northern Luzon. The Army maintained there Camp John Hay as well as an inn where the Braisted family sought relief from the hot lowland Luzon. The old walled city of Manila was very much as it had been when the Americans captured it from the Spanish twenty-five years earlier. On the Escalta, the main street, our open Hupmobile competed with horse-drawn calesas and carabao-drawn carts. The Braisteds lived in the Mason Court Apartments about three blocks inland from the bay. There the windows were of shell, not glass, there were no screens, and we slept under mosquito nets. Peacocks preened and cried out in the garden. My father was allowed to carry our family from Manila to Subic Bay, where the ship’s bottom was cleaned in Drydock Dewey. The Navy families celebrated the departure of the fleet for China in the spring. The Easter bunny miraculously laid eggs in a drawer of our stateroom in the Dollar liner on the morning of our arrival at Hong Kong. The Braisted family spent about a month at the beautiful hotel on the practically empty beach at Repulse Bay on the ocean side of Hong Kong Island. We hired chairs to carry us up the peak. But five-year-old Billy gave up his chair and walked because he could not stand the tossing by the merry coolies who had so much fun with such a light load. From Hong Kong we pushed on to Shanghai, where we spent several weeks at the aging Palace Hotel at the junction of Nanking Road and the bund in the International Settlement. In the gift shop at the other fine hotel, the Astor House, my mother bought a jade and diamond ring that was her best dinner ring during the remaining years of her life. We spent the summer of 1923 at the Shantung coastal city of Chefoo, the fleet’s summer anchorage. Our beachside hotel lacked running water, so a coolie prepared our baths in a tin tub and tended the chamber pot. My father secured leave so that he and the family could visit Peking. We stayed at the Wagons Lits Hotel in the Legation Quarter and close xii / Preface to the city wall, the top of which became my playground. My father’s leave, however, was cut short by the earthquake that leveled much of the Tokyo-Yokohama area in September. With the help of camels carrying rugs that my parents had purchased from Mme Feté’s rug factory, he was able to reach the Hulbert so that she could race with the Asiatic Fleet for Japan. Apparently the fleet was not needed there and was ordered to resume its normal schedule on the China coast. My father radioed my mother, “Proceed Shanghai.” She had never before received such a peremptory order and concluded that we must proceed as soon as possible from Peking to Shanghai by the fastest transport, the Shanghai Express, a frightening undertaking because the previous spring bandits had held up the train and carried the foreign passengers into the hills of Shantung. We were assured, however, that the train would be protected by two carloads of troops attached to the rear. When my mother reported this in Shanghai, she was told that the soldiers were, of course, unarmed. Had they been armed, they...