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

11 Calls to the North

11 Calls to the North Even as the Navy addressed immediate threats to Americans in the Yangtze River valley and South China, the specter of approaching crisis in the north provoked urgent appeals from North China, especially from the American Legation in Peking. The forces of the Manchurian warlord, Marshal Chang Tso-lin, uneasily occupied the PekingTientsin area, but the armies of his sometime warlord supporters, Chang Tsung-chang and Sun Ch’uan-fang, having been driven from south of the Yangtze by the Nationalists, were in disorderly retreat up the TientsinPukow railway. Another Nationalist column was making gestures toward moving up the second main north-south rail trunkline, from Hankow to Peking. And finally, the so-called Christian general, the unpredictable Feng Yu-hsiang, occupied an area to the northwest of Peking while the “model warlord,” General Yen Hsi-shan, commanded a well-disciplined force in Shensi to the west. The foreign powers still claimed the right under the Boxer Protocol of 1901 to keep open communication between Peking and the sea. It had been repeatedly demonstrated, however, that the small foreign forces in Tientsin and the legation guards at Peking were wholly inadequate to establish control over the railway link between Peking and the sea against requisitioning by the ever larger and increasingly well equipped warlord armies. Railways in North China had become a vital factor in warlord operations. Confronted with the potential for violence comparable to that at Nanking in 1927, Minister MacMurray continued to agitate for implementation of the Army’s Yellow Plan. Yet, as in the aftermath of the Nanking Incident , MacMurray was repeatedly blocked by his superiors in Washington and by Admiral Williams at Shanghai. Warning that conditions in North China were becoming increasingly unstable, MacMurray gave his support to a new proposal from Brigadier General Joseph C. Castner, commander of the Fifteenth Infantry at Tientsin, that the Army transport Thomas, then conveying relief personnel to the Philippines, divert to Tientsin. These troops, together with the fifteen hundred Marines recently ordered to China in the naval transport Henderson, would constitute the first two steps toward implementing the Army’s Yellow Plan.1 At Shanghai, Admiral Williams was still under pressure from his Marine commander, Smedley Butler, to keep the Army from edging the Marines out of China. Williams alerted Butler that in response to inquiries from Washington it might be necessary for the commander in chief to recommend that a “reinforced brigade of the Army” be mobilized in the Philippines for possible service in China, to which Butler countered that the reinforced brigade should be Marine, not Army. Williams admitted that he too preferred Marines and that he had already asked for as many Marines as could be subscribed for China service: one regiment to be sent immediately and the balance to be mobilized at San Diego and moved to a point near China.2 In his recommendations to Washington, Williams astutely pressed the Marines to the fore, even as he gave courteous recognition Calls to the North / 155 to the Army. Rather than divert the Army troops on board Grant to Tientsin, it would be better, he represented to Washington, to prepare an Army brigade in Manila ready to sail directly to Tientsin. But he also pointed out that the Sixth Marine Regiment was due to arrive at Shanghai in Henderson on 29 April and that he planned to send them to Tientsin if necessary. In addition, still another Marine regiment was then assembling at San Diego for possible service on the Asiatic Station. Intending to keep the situation in North China within the capacity of the Navy to meet, Williams recommended that, should Americans in the area be endangered, they should go for protection to Tientsin, not Peking , and that the legation and its staff should also move from Peking to Tientsin.3 At Tientsin the Americans would be just eighteen miles by water (the Hai Ho) to the sea. Officials in Washington were more responsive to Admiral Williams’s modest proposals than to Minister MacMurray’s rather frightened appeals for the dispatch of a large expeditionary force to North China. From the War Department, the cautious Lieutenant General C. P. Summerall, the Army Chief of Staff, advised that the Chinese were wholly unlikely to attack Americans unless attacked. Moreover, the forces already in North China, in the general’s opinion, were adequate to protect foreigners against mob violence at Peking and Tientsin. There was also no guarantee that “one or more...