5
The Attack on Pearl Harbor (1941)
The Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, the American naval base near Honolulu, took place on the morning of Sunday, 7 December 1941, and brought Japan and America into what was now a world war. In Shanghai, across the International Date Line, it was already Monday, 8 December, and I was lying in bed reading my Bible. This was not for religious reasons – my parents were strongly agnostic. But scripture was my best subject, perhaps because I responded to the strong stories in the classroom versions of the Old Testament. At any rate, I still remember the scornful tones in which the Reverend Matthews announced the winner of a Bible competition. ‘First, and the biggest heathen in the class, is Ballard.’ A schoolmaster’s favourite phrase, no doubt, but I took great pride in it. I remember telling everyone that not only was I an atheist, but I was going to join the Communist Party. I admired anyone who could unsettle people, and the Communist labour organisers had certainly unsettled my father.
I was preparing for the Christmas term exams, and the scripture test was to be held that day. Then I heard what sounded like tanks and military vehicles moving down Amherst Avenue, and my father burst into my bedroom. He stared around wildly, as if he had never seen my room before. He ordered me to get dressed, and told me that Japan had declared war. ‘But I have to go to school,’ I protested. ‘Exams start today.’ He then uttered the greatest words a schoolboy can ever hear. ‘There’ll be no more school, and no more exams.’
I took all this in my stride, but my father was clearly rattled. He raced around the house, shouting at the servants and at my mother. I assume he had heard on the local radio stations that Japanese forces were entering the International Settlement. They swiftly seized control, and their naval units on the Whangpoo river sank the British gunboat, HMS Petrel, whose crew put up a spirited fight. Later, Japanese officers visited the wounded survivors in hospital and, out of respect for their courage, bowed to them in the best traditions of bushido. The American gunboat, the USS Wake, was captured without a shot being fired – almost all the crew were ashore, asleep with their girlfriends in the hotels of downtown Shanghai.
The French Concession was already under the control of the Vichy government, and the Japanese army seized all key sites within the Settlement. That day their Kempeitai (the Japanese Gestapo) arrested several hundred British and American civilians, who were the first Allied nationals to be interned. By luck my father was not among them, and we remained in our house until March 1943. Those imprisoned soon after the Pearl Harbor attack were brutally treated, but in Shanghai, fortu-nately, there were a large number of Swiss and Swedish nationals, and their presence may have restrained the Japanese, though there were many violent arrests and killings.
The old Shanghai ceased to exist from this point. There were no more parties or film premieres, no more visits to department stores and the swimming pool. The Country Club became a Japanese officers’ club – my mother told me in tones of great indignation that they had stabled their horses in the squash courts. The Japanese army aggressively enforced its presence throughout the Settlement, and street executions of Chinese were common. All foreign cars were confiscated, and my father bought a bicycle to take him the five miles to his office.
The China Printing and Finishing Company still functioned, presumably as a useful source of revenue for the Japanese. There were two Japanese supervisors in the office – one of them was an architect – and I think my father had reasonable relations with them, though he was probably forced to lay off staff. Once when I was with him in his office he took me for a walk around the Cathedral cloisters nearby. Eventually a middle-aged White Russian joined us, and my father handed him some money. He thanked my father profusely and slipped away. As firms and factories closed, jobs must have been difficult to find. The Russian seemed desperately poor, and my father told me matter-of-factly that the shirt and collar beneath his tie and waistcoat was a tiny bib stitched together from rags, which he washed every day in the river.
Social life in the British community came to an end, along with my mother’s bridge and tennis parties. Except for the chauffeur, who was rehired after the war, we employed the same number of servants, including the latest in the line of Russian nannies, and they stayed with us until a few days before we were interned.
My parents spent hours listening to the short-wave radio broadcasts from Britain and America. The fall of Singapore, and the sinking of the British battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales, devastated us all. British prestige plummeted from that moment. The surrender of Singapore, the capture of the Philippines and the threat to India and Australia sounded the death knell of Western power in the Far East and the end of a way of life. It would take the British years to recover from Dunkirk, and the German armies were already deep inside Russia. Despite my admiration for the Japanese soldiers and pilots, I was intensely patriotic, but I could see that the British Empire had failed. I began to look at A.A. Milne and the Chums annuals with a far more sceptical eye.
Yet I remember, some time in 1942, my father pinning a large map of Russia to the wall near the radio, and marking out the shifting front line between the Germans and Russians. In many areas the Germans were in retreat, though the Russian front advanced with agonising slowness, a village at a time. All the same, my father had begun to recover a little of his confidence.
I constantly asked him how long the war would last and I remember that he was convinced it would go on for several years. Here he was at odds with many of the English in Shanghai, who still believed that the defeated British forces in the Far East would rally and swiftly defeat the Japanese. Even I, at the age of 11 or 12, knew that this was a dangerous delusion. I had seen the Japanese soldiers at close quarters, and knew that they were tougher, more disciplined and far better led than the British and American soldiers in Shanghai, who seemed bored and only interested in going home. But many of the fathers of boys in my form still assumed that the war would be over in a few months.
My one great disappointment was that the Cathedral School reopened, within a month or so of Pearl Harbor. I cycled to school, but always came straight home afterwards, though sometimes I had to wait for hours to get through the checkpoint at the end of the Avenue Joffre. Downtown Shanghai was far too dangerous, as Japanese military vehicles swerved through the streets, knocking rickshaws and cyclists out of their way, and Chinese puppet troops harassed any Europeans who caught their eye.
Despite these hazards, my father insisted that I attend school. One morning we cycled together to the Avenue Joffre checkpoint and found that it had been closed as part of a military sweep, along with all other checkpoints into the International Settlement. Undeterred, my father wheeled his bicycle through the crowd and set off with me along the Columbia Road to the house of English friends. Their long garden ended at the barbed-wire fence first erected around the Settlement in 1937 and now in disrepair. Helped by the English friends, we lifted our cycles through the loosened wire and stepped into the grounds of a derelict casino and nightclub named the Del Monte. Concerned that there might be Japanese in the building, my father told me to wait while he stepped through an open rear door. After a few minutes I could no longer restrain myself, and walked on tiptoe through the silent gaming rooms where roulette tables lay on their sides and the floor was covered with broken glasses and betting chips. Gilded statues propped up the canopy of the bars that ran the length of the casino, and on the floor ornate chandeliers cut down from the ceiling tilted among the debris of bottles and old newspapers. Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.