I CHOSE TO BE A U.S. MARINE

Chapter 4 – The Marines Depart Tsingtao In early 1948 the pressure that Mao Tse-tung was exerting upon the Republic of China forces of Chiang K’ai-shek necessitated that Marines be withdrawn from Peking. George Carrington, your narrator, had put a lot into his study of China and Chinese, so of course he did not welcome the planned transfer of his unit of the Fifth Marines to Guam. I jiggered up a little medical complaint that enabled me to visit Tsingtao, where abided the hospital ship Repose and headquarters now of Naval Forces Western Pacific. At this time there were no field artillery forces in China. The small, symbolic, Marine Corps organization was commanded by Col. Sam Griffith, old China hand and Chinese linguist. I hoped that he would be sympathetic to my plea to get to Tsingtao, versus Guam! When I got back to Peking – lo and behold – I don’t know whether it was Sam’s doings or an independent request, but the naval command on board the command ship El Dorado needed an assistant intelligence officer. I would have preferred the shore with Marines, but things were to work out O. K. I did not have to go to Guam. Tsingtao was a beautiful port city on the Shantung peninsula opposite Korea. It was not so prominent as some other Chinese cities, but it was clearly the spot where fewer U.S. forces would be centered as our presence became less and less meaningful in the duel between Chiang and Mao. Tsingtao could be said to have first caught the foreigners’ attention at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. The Germans, trying to catch up to Britain, France, and Russia in the competition to secure islets termed concessions in China, concentrated on this city. Maybe today we best recognize Tsingtao as the name of a beer of popularity. The Germans were Lutherans, and whatta you know - I was married in the Lutheran Church there. I remember a Marine standing for inspection in the best tradition of the Corps, on being found not up to snuff, protesting that his houseboy, coolie type, was the one to be reprimanded. Once when a boisterous group celebrated too excessively by crowning the Chinese mayor’s son with a bottle of that Tsingtao beer, the big admiral decreed no more liberty, for all hands. This was mass punishment. And it did not work nor stand for long. Once I volunteered to act as a defense counsel in a minor occasion of poor discipline. Thereafter all sailors in trouble on El Dorado sought me out for help. My personal life there was pleasant and eventful. I went to my “office” aboard the El Dorado, lived in a foreign style home with others, including my naval captain boss, who liked the bottle so much, that he commented when he did not make admiral that he would have preferred being promoted to being a bishop anyway. We had golf, tennis, small boat sailing, and plenty of parties and good times. Well, I get to the business of intelligence. There was not too much to it. I would be called upon daily to make a presentation on the map to the assembled staff about events of the day. I felt that our navy command did not realize the magnitude, the growing number of communist forces, the Ba Lu as we termed them meaning Eighth Army, were coming into Shantung. This was principally by night and by hundreds of junks or small craft which were filtered across the northern Yellow Sea from the Liaoning peninsula and Port Arthur area. Once I described some action of KMT forces as a “retreat.” The big admiral who was known as Savvy Cooke immediately jumped all over me for calling a movement of Chiang’s troops as a “retreat.” I hastily changed my wording to “withdrawal.” And anyway I found I could go to the Shanghai newspapers to brief on the events of the day, rather than rely upon some reports from higher authority intelligence sources. I was able to drift around the Tsingtao docks and piers, chattering in my limited mandarin, to report on the designation of friendly units. My fellow intelligence companions were an interesting group. Our captain was a Japanese linguist and intelligence officer. Our day was to commence at eight a.m., and sometimes, while he was still in the sack recovering from a too exuberant evening, we would have to cover for him by resort to handy, deceptive use of the phone. We had a junior officer who had been schooled in Russian. Not much business there, but he was a good link to the members of the State Department. Their organization was termed an External Survey Detachment, one day to becoming an element of the CIA.