The WWII POW Experience in the PacificRobert E. WinslowSergeant Major, USMC (Retired) (1939-1970)April, 2007

NORTH CHINA MARINES

On December 8, 1941 (Tokyo time) the 204 members of the Marine Legation Guard, Tientsin and the American Embassy Guard, Peiping earned the dubious honor of becoming the first Marine prisoners of the Japanese.

The North China Marines had been scheduled to return to the United States on 10 December 1941 in the President Harrison, which had helped to evacuate the 4th Marines from Shanghai during the last week of November. A detail of 22 men from Tientsin would be captured on the docks at Chingwantao while preparing for this evacuation.

At approximately 0800 on 8 December a thousand Japanese troops surrounded the 47-Marine-strong Tientsin barracks while three planes circled overhead. The Marine gate sentry phoned his commanding officer, Major Luther A. Brown, to inform him that a Major Omura, who was well known to Brown, wished to speak to him. Major Omura carried with him a written surrender proposal which warned that the alternative to surrender was “that the Japanese would enforce their proposal with the troops at hand.”

Brown told the major that he would sign the proposal only if his Marines were accorded diplomatic privileges due them under the “Boxer protocol” of 1901, a document which had been signed by both Japan and the United States, and which Brown believed guaranteed the repatriation of his men. Apparently, no such provision existed, although Major Brown and his commanding officer at Peiping, Colonel William W. Ashurst, claimed to have heard of it from State Department officials. The U. S. State Department played along with Brown’s claim, but the Japanese remained unconvinced.

Following a telephone conversation with the local Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Kyogi Tomanaga, with whom Brown had been friendly in pre-war days, Major Omura stated that Japan would agree to honor the protocol, if found to be valid.

This was the beginning of Major Brown’s nit-picking assaults on the validity of Japanese war-time activities, based upon his sometimes creative interpretation of international treaties and doctrines, especially the Geneva Accords governing the treatment of prisoners of war. We Wake Islanders who wound up in prison camp with him would come to admire his tenacious and ceaseless complaints about prison camp conditions, in spite of our tensions with his fellow North China Marine “diplomats.” The prison camp rumor mill had it that the early death of our first Japanese camp commander, Colonel Yuse, was brought about, at least in part, by Major Brown’s constant badgering of the colonel over prison camp conditions.

Major Brown was known by all Marines as “Handbook Brown,” in recognition of his authorship of the “Handbook for Marines,” the fore-runner of today’s “Guidebook for Marines,” the latest edition of which I understand is still a mandatory purchase for all Marines. Major Brown, having laid down a few rules himself for Marines to follow, was a stickler for regulations. If it wasn’t written down somewhere, said Major Brown, you can’t do it. The Japanese military bureaucracy, operating under exactly the same ground rules, had no defense against this argument. In retrospect, I think that Major Brown had a great time instructing the Japanese on how to properly run a prison camp.

In Tientsin, General Tominaga arranged for Brown to telephone his commanding officer, Colonel William W. Ashurst, commander of the American Embassy Guard in Peiping and senior Marine officer in North China. Ashurst advised Brown to accept the Japanese terms. He too, he said, was being forced to accept a similar proposal.

It was hoped that non-resistance would enhance their presumed diplomatic status and facilitate repatriation. Immediately after the capture of the Embassy and Legation guard detachments, the American government, through Swiss diplomatic channels, attempted to get Japan to recognize their diplomatic status. In a telegram of 26 December 1941, the Swiss government was requested to inform Japan that “[t]he United States Government considers that its official personnel subject to this exchange (of diplomatic personnel) includes. . . the Marine guards remaining in China. . .” Japan replied that the Marines remaining in China constituted a military unit, and thus could not be considered diplomatic personnel.

The U. S. Government responded through Swiss channels that it would revert to this point at a later date. Reading between the lines, the Japanese government no doubt inferred from this statement that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor the status of a handful of North China Marines was a minor issue that did not engage the full attention of the United States Government, and the inference appears to have been correct.

For whatever reason, the State Department neglected to press the issue in a timely manner, although its telegram to the Japanese government in March of 1942 still referred to the North China Marines as “diplomatic guards” eligible for exchange. This belated assertion was obviously “too little, too late” and North China Marines were destined to remain in Japanese hands until the end of the war, in spite of hopeful assertions by many of them to their fellow POWs from Wake Island that any day now we will be going home and leaving you suckers behind because we have “diplomatic immunity.”

Ironically, four Marines left behind in Shanghai to wind up the affairs of the 4th Marine Regiment managed to hornswoggle the Japanese into granting them diplomatic status, and returned to the States on the first exchange ship.

In Peiping, prior to the surrender ceremony, a Japanese photographer wishing to record the event was curtly dismissed by the Japanese officer in charge of the ceremony, Lieutenant Colonel J. Katayama, with these words: “I cannot support that unnecessary disgrace be added to an already difficult occasion.” This rare exercise in courtesy and consideration was due, at least in part, to pre-war social contacts between Japanese and Marine officers. In later surrender ceremonies in other parts of Japan’s new empire Japanese officers went out of their way to inflict humiliation upon their captives.

On January 8th the Peiping Marines were moved to Tientsin. They were allowed a full seabag and a blanket roll containing clothes and toilet articles. Personal property, such as souvenirs and pictures, were loaded on trucks to be stored at the Swiss Consulate. Even bunks and mattresses were taken along. The combined detachments remained in Tientsin almost two weeks, pretty much left alone by the Japanese, except for occasional shakedowns and a twice daily body count.

A couple of days before departure from Tientsin, the Japanese permitted the civilian friends of the Tientsin Marines to enter the compound for a visit lasting several hours. Corporal Alan Sydow was engaged to Iris Greenland, a British girl, at the time of the surrender. He requested permission from the Japanese commander to marry the young lady before leaving Tientsin. Much to everyone’s surprise, the request was granted, and they were married several days before the troops’ departure. The Sydows would be happily reunited at the end of the war.

When all hands were mustered to move out on January 28, 1942, Sergeant George B. Stone and Corporal Donald R. Marshall were missing. They had concealed themselves in the attic of one of the barracks. They had blankets and food and water enough for three days, and planned to escape into the countryside once the compound was evacuated. Their plans came to naught when Japanese troops remained in the compound, blocking any hope of escape. After running out of food and water and suffering from extreme cold they turned themselves in. They later joined their comrades in the Woosung POW camp. Stone’s feet were so severely frost-bitten that he was permanently crippled; Marshall suffered no apparent ill-effects. This was the first of several escape attempts involving Marines in Shanghai prison camps. Only two of them, in the latter stages of the war, would succeed.

After searching the compound for about an hour without success, the guards moved the Marines to the railroad station, where they embarked in small boxcars of a vintage similar to the “40 et 8” French railway cars of World War I fame.

Warmly dressed and equipped with blankets, the Marines were not unduly affected by the freezing weather during the six day journey to Shanghai. Three times a day the train stopped at a railway station where the troops received the standard Japanese ration of rice and a small piece of fish or vegetable in a small wooden “bento” box, along with hot tea.

Their arrival in the Woosung prison camp was not a matter for celebration by its earlier residents, the civilians and especially the Marines from Wake Island, who resented the presence of a fully clothed and winterized contingent of Marines who for the most part refused to share their “wealth” with their desperately needy fellow Marines.

The foregoing account of the surrender of the North China Marine Embassy and Legation Guard Detachments is based largely on the narrative contained in Victory and Occupation: History of U. S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Volume V, Historical Branch, U. S. Marine Corps, 1968, Benis M. Frank & Henry L. Shaw.

Alan Sydow (1920)