Chinese troops counter-attacked, led by the 31st Division, so famed for night assaults that they were called ‘the sleep robbers’. In an overnight battle the Japanese were routed, losing ten thousand killed or captured out of a force of thirty thousand men.
Robert Capa, a twenty-four-year-old photographer already famous for his work in the Spanish Civil War, had gone into action with the Chinese troops, carrying only his camera. Life magazine, whose editor and proprietor Henry Luce was taking a close interest in the conflict, spread the photos over two pages, beginning the accompanying story with a battle-cry of an opening paragraph: ‘To the names of small towns famous as turning points in history, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Verdun add still another. It is T’aierhchuang.’ History was not to be as kind to the Chinese army as it was to the victors of those earlier battles.
The front and the fighting may have been far away, but Hankow had plenty to offer a young man trying to break into journalism. The city provided the influx of famous correspondents with a perfect vantage-point for the next stage of the struggle by a united Chinese front against the forces of fascism. The communist– nationalist front was probably more genuine at this period than at any other time in the years 1938–45. Chou En-lai and a large communist delegation had moved into Hankow to take up their roles in the front government. There was also a big German military delegation in the city, led by a German World War I hero and former Nazi, Captain Walter Stennes, who was advising Chiang Kai-shek.
Above all there was a great cast of foreign correspondents, mainly American, who had assembled in the city: Haldore Hanson of the Associated Press, Edgar Snow of the Saturday Evening Post and the Daily Herald in London and his wife Peg, otherwise know by her nom de plume Nym Wales, Jack Belden of United Press International and later Time magazine, Tillman Durdin of the New York Times, Art Steele of the Chicago Daily News, Agnes Smedley for a range of American radical magazines, and Freda Utley of the News Chronicle in London.
The arrival of Peter Fleming of the London Times with his actress wife Celia Johnson was a publicity coup for the Chinese government. Fleming was a well-known figure on London’s literary and social scene and had received acclaim for his first book, News from Tartary, describing a journey from Peking to Kashmir, published in 1936. Although later overshadowed by his elder brother Ian, the creator of James Bond, it was Peter who first became famous. His marriage in 1935 to Celia Johnson, who would star in Brief Encounter with Trevor Howard in 1945, was a high-society wedding that had greatly excited the gossip columns of the day. Celia Johnson was a star in her own right who had performed leading roles in a series of West End stage hits; her film career did not begin until 1941.
Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden arrived in the city on 8 March 1938 and were quick to meet up with the Flemings. The Times correspondent had clearly overdressed for the occasion: ‘In his khaki shirt and shorts, complete with golf stockings, strong suede shoes, waterproof wristwatch and Leica camera, he might have stepped straight from a London tailor’s window, advertising Gents’ tropical exploration kit,’ wrote Isherwood in the diary that would form part of Journey to a War. Isherwood also decided that, despite their earlier reservations about the perils of wartime China, they were in the right place: ‘Today Auden and I agreed that we would rather be in Hankow at this moment than anywhere else on earth.’
Like many other new journalists in Hankow, Auden and Isherwood contacted Agnes Smedley soon after arriving. They found her in her room at the Lutheran mission, where she immediately began to cross-examine them on their political views. Smedley did not have a lot of patience with those who did not agree with her radical opinions. She had already met George Hogg at the mission, and saw in him a naïve, unformed, innocent abroad who was prepared to approach the war in China with an open mind. She also saw a tall, good-looking young Englishman. They became friends as well as colleagues, but although Smedley was famously liberal with her sexual favours, it is unlikely that they became lovers.
Hogg described her as ‘tall, rather grim and Eton cropped, about forty, an ardent communist of the Chinese not the Russian variety’. He was certainly awestruck by the strength of her views and the way she furiously argued her case with other members of the US press corps. Smedley believed that the government of Chiang Kai-shek was a crypto-fascist organisation, and that the communists held out the only hope for China. This was not a popular view at the time, but Smedley made it her life’s work to offend those in power, those she worked with, and most of her friends.
It was remarkable that a flamboyant feminist and radical activist who became a publicly outspoken supporter of the communist cause in general, and Mao’s brand of Chinese communism in particular, should have formed a friendship with a rather naïve young Oxford graduate. But Smedley was an unusual woman, with an extraordinary past. Her latest biographer, Ruth Price, presents a well-documented case that Smedley was in fact an agent of the Comintern, the organisation set up in Moscow in 1919 to foment communist revolution around the world.
She had been born in rural poverty in Missouri in 1892, and when she was ten her family had moved to the coal country of Colorado. Her father was a labourer by profession and a drunk by inclination. Her mother died from malnourishment when Agnes was sixteen. Her father rifled the few savings she had hidden away – $45 – and went to get drunk with the boys. Agnes was left at home with a younger sister and two brothers. She also had charge of a baby born to an elder sister who had died in childbirth. She took a decision then that she was to live by all her life. She would not play by society’s rules. She would not live as other women did, and certainly not as a drudge looking after four children and a drunk of a father.
Making rudimentary arrangements for the children, Agnes left home to begin a life of semi-vagabondage that was to last for years. She arrived in New York in her early twenties, worked as a waitress during the day and by night studied at New York University. Here, during the years of the First World War, she became politically active among Indian exile nationalists seeking to overthrow the British Raj. Typically, Smedley was not content with political posturing. In 1918 she was convicted and jailed for gun-running and violating America’s Neutrality Act. Thus began her life as a radical, which was only to end with her death in 1950, while she was under investigation for espionage.
Her biographer Ruth Price described Smedley as ‘a virago who challenged the world…Smedley sparked intense, divergent responses in a tremendous range of people in her lifetime.’ Political conservatives saw her as either a dizzy camp-follower of the Chinese communists or a dangerous revolutionary to be suppressed at all costs. Fellow journalists dismissed her fervent reportage as wholly slanted; others were offended by her morals: she publicly boasted of sleeping with ‘all colours and shapes’. Those who actually knew her saw either a troubled and unstable eccentric or an impossibly soft-hearted dreamer. ‘I may not be innocent, but I am right,’ was one of her sayings, but it might well have been, ‘I went too far – and then further.’
By the time Smedley arrived in China in 1929 she had already been branded a dangerous radical by conservatives. The Frankfurter Zeitung refused to publish her first reports of Japanese atrocities after the invasion of Manchuria. But she was proved right, and became a leading correspondent for the paper until the Nazis took power in 1933. Her London publisher, Victor Gollancz, drew her to the attention of the Manchester Guardian, which also appointed her a correspondent in China.
As in every other city that has hosted journalists in a time of crisis – Saigon and Salisbury, Rhodesia, in the 1970s, Jerusalem at almost any time and Beirut in the eighties – the foreign correspondents gathered at one particular watering hole to gossip, drink, fall in love and betray each other. In Saigon it was the bar of the Continental Palace, in Salisbury the Quill Club, and in Beirut the Commodore Hotel. In Hankow it was both the US naval canteen and the nearby Terminus Hotel. The modern history of Hankow is closely connected with that of the Yangtse Patrol, a US naval detachment which was there to protect the American presence and personnel in the city, and whose fleet of gunboats operated from the riverfront. As far as the press was concerned the real contribution of the patrol was its canteen, which like the US Navy was supposed to be dry. Since the Hankow press corps spent so much time there, one assumes they managed to circumvent the rules.
Smedley was a key figure among the correspondents who gathered