Last Out Before the Rape of
Nanjing,
First Into Singapore
and Last Out Before the Fall
‘The sky over Singapore is
black with the smoke of a dozen huge fires … The roar and crash of cannonade
and the bursting bombs are shaking my typewriter …’
-
C. Yates
McDaniel, February 11, 1942. Singapore fell to the Japanese four days later,
the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Oddly enough, the British
Empire portable typewriter was the name of a version of McDaniel’s own
typewriter, a Hermes Baby. The difference being McDaniel’s Hermes Baby kept
typing the truth and informing the world of Japanese atrocities.
Yates McDaniel types his
story about the fall of Singapore on his Hermes Baby portable typewriter, while
sitting on a fallen palm tree on the island of Bangka in Sumatra on February 14,
1942. This photo was taken by West Australian war correspondent Athole Stewart,
who nicknamed McDaniel “Robinson Crusoe”. The day before, Yates had photographed his car being
pushed into the Port of Singapore by British servicemen, to prevent it falling
into the hands of the invading Japanese forces.
On September 22, 1937, Associated
Press war correspondent Charles Yates McDaniel reported from Nanjing, “Japan’s
threat to rain death and destruction on China’s capital was carried out today
in disregard of American, British, French and German protests against
unrestricted bombing of a great city … Scores [of poorer Chinese civilians]
were burned to death as incendiary bombs lighted tinder-like straw huts along
the Yangtze River front. Most of those who died were too feeble or helpless to
join the great exodus to the open countryside to escape death from the skies.”
Natalie and Yates McDaniel
McDaniel and his wife Olga Natalie (née Eills) had two days
earlier left their home on the outskirts of Nanjing and moved into the vacated
United States Embassy in the besieged city, after embassy staff were
transferred to the patrol boat the USS Luzon and moved up the Yangtze to Wuhu. Japanese
aircraft, sweeping over central government buildings, had dropped bombs near
their home (“in a dangerously exposed area”).
“Mrs McDaniel and I talked it over and decided we will remain so long as
there is any vestige of communications with the outside world. Mrs McDaniel is
a Japanese-born American girl [she was in fact born in Boston, Massachusetts] who
has spoken Japanese from infancy. She also has a broad knowledge of far eastern
affairs and is staying with me to help inform the outside world of the
heightening crisis here.” McDaniel himself was Chinese-born and grew up
speaking Mandarin, so in some ways the McDaniels found themselves ideally
qualified to cover Japan’s invasion. But Yates McDaniel had only joined AP two
years earlier, aged just 29 in 1935, and such widespread death and destruction wasn’t something he was expecting - or indeed suited - to cover.
All that changed when in mid-August 1937 Chiang Kai-shek laid
siege to the Japanese area of Shanghai International Settlement, leading to the
Battle of Shanghai. On August 23, Japanese Army reinforcements succeeded in
landing in northern Shanghai. The McDaniels had returned to Nanjing from
covering fighting in Tianjin, a port city in north-eastern China, only a
week before the September 22 bombing raid on the capital, driving to Shanghai
and then hitching a lift at night to Nanjing in an ambulance. It “was forced to
run without headlights because Japanese air bombers aimed at it the whole way.”
Such perils, all for the sake of helping “inform the outside
world of the heightening crisis”, might have been, at that time, new experiences
for the McDaniels. Yates McDaniel, indeed, by no means exemplified the
archetypal war correspondent. He was the son of Baptist missionaries, born in Suzhou,
west of Shanghai, on August 28, 1906; a US university-educated, modest, mild-mannered,
slightly-built man, a chain smoker. McDaniel first worked as a
journalist on Florida’s Sarasota Herald
when it was founded in 1925, then moved to the Durham Morning Herald in North Carolina before returning to China
in 1929, when Carl Crow started the Shanghai
Evening Post & Mercury.
Yates McDaniel as a young reporter
How he found the derring-do, the bravado to do
the things he did – to persistently go “find the war”, to face and deal with both
victims and violent antagonists, to write under fire – and to become regarded as the pluckiest
journalist among his peers, is difficult to fathom. But as TIME magazine pointed out in March 1942, under the headline, “The
Press: From the Horror’s Mouth”, “C. Yates McDaniel is only 35, but his hair is
almost white. It should be. [He’s] had enough narrow escapes to earn many a
thread of silver. His experiences … entitle him to a snow-white thatch for the
rest of his life. For Yates McDaniel watched the collapse of Singapore at close
hand [and] filed a dispatch that might well have been the last farewell of a
crack reporter.”
Back
in Nanjing in September 1937, the American and Chinese friends of the
McDaniels’ issued them with urgent pleas to escape “before the storm breaks”.
They expected the Japanese to show “no mercy”, yet their commitment to wiring
out news stories from the war front remained firm. And so it was to be for
McDaniel, as he continued for the next seven years to cover Japan’s ruthless
push to conquer the Pacific rim.
In November 1937 Natalie McDaniel was able to join an evacuation for Shanghai aboard a US
rescue ship. She was eventually reunited with her husband and the pair reached
Los Angeles from Hong Kong aboard the President
Coolidge on February 3, 1940. But the couple was soon back in the Pacific
war zone, both now working for AP.
Natalie got out of Singapore ahead of her husband, but while the city was
already burning and crumbling (her own words). She reached Java then Melbourne in Australia,
where she waited for Yates to join her.
Natalie opened her AP story from Melbourne on March 8 with the words,
“Eight times a refugee from the Japanese, I once again am awaiting my newspaperman
husband … Shanghai, Nanking, Hong Kong, Canton, French Indo-China, Tientsin [Tianjin]
and then Singapore and Batavia – one by one I’ve fled from their falling walls.
After spending weeks too close to the battle zones, this war-ready city seems
positively peaceful.” (Natalie lived to the fine old age of 85, and died in St
Petersburg, Pinellas, Florida, on December 17, 1992). Unlike her husband,
Natalie had already lived an adventurous life, long before she reached
Australia. At the age of 5½, in February 1913, she had been kidnapped by her father,
Unitarian clergyman, expert telegrapher and stockbroker John Eills (aka Ellis,
Delisle and D’Lisle) and taken to Japan. After her mother Harriet tried to
snatch her back, a series of court battles in Tokyo in 1916 resulted in her
father winning custody (he had gone there knowing Japanese law favoured the father is such disputes). Although the 1920 US census has her living with
grandparents in Boston, she in fact remained in Japan. She married Yates
McDaniel in Yokohama in April 1934, still using Olga as her first name and
Eills as her surname. During the next few years Mrs McDaniel became
Japanese-born Natalie, maiden name Ellis, in an effort to put her strange past behind her.
Following Natalie’s departure in November 1937, Yates McDaniel remained in a house owned
by the British American Tobacco Company in Nanjing for four days after the
capital fell on December 12. A week earlier he and four other American
correspondents had been offered a chance to get out on board the gunboat USS Panay, which left on the 11th and was soon sunk by the Japanese. All the correspondents had turned down the
offer. McDaniel wasn’t able to get his story of the fall out for five days –
and then it was wired from the Japanese destroyer the Tsuga. McDaniel opened it with the words, “The morale of Chinese
armies defending Nanking broke suddenly Sunday afternoon. What had been planned
as a slow, ordered retreat turned into a wild rout. Nanking had a night of
terror.” The aftermath became known as the “Rape of Nanking”.
Oakland Tribune, December 17, 1937
The American correspondents tried to get out of Nanjing on
December 14, only to discover the Panay
had been sunk. The next day four of them
were able to board gunboats, but McDaniel returned to the US embassy building
before finally boarding the Tsuga,
bound for Shanghai, on December 16.
Four years later Yates McDaniel found himself reporting on
Japanese atrocities once more, this time as one of the first foreign
correspondents to arrive in Singapore. As he had done in Nanjing, he was also among
the last to leave that fallen city. His story was the very last news dispatch
out of Singapore, wired at 3.45pm local time on February 12. Lieutenant-General Arthur
Percival, commander of the British garrison, formally surrendered to the
Japanese invaders 90 minutes later!
Yates McDaniel’s photo of a large freighter
after being hit by Japanese bombs in the Port of Singapore docks on February
12, 1942.
Within seven hours, just after midnight on February 13, McDaniel
was among 55 male evacuees and a 19-year-old Chinese woman, Doris Lim, who boarded the steamer Kung Wo leaving the flaming Port
of Singapore. It was the last vessel off the doomed island outpost. McDaniel finally reached
Jakarta in Indonesia (then still Batavia in the Netherlands East Indies) 7½
days later. McDaniel’s camera was ruined, his trousers were filthy, his shoes
battered and his shirt borrowed. He hadn’t slept in a bed for 11 days. The Kung Wo was bombed on its way to Java
and passengers and crew abandoned ship to reach the island of Bangka – where McDaniel
was photographed typing his departure story on his Hermes Baby portable. In the
early hours of February 15, McDaniel waded and swam to a ferry launch that took
him up the Indragiri River in Sumatra. He crossed “the mountain wilds” to Padang
by truck, rail and pony cart and at Emmahaven boarded a British destroyer.
McDaniel completed “the 1200 roundabout miles safely through the Indian Ocean”,
his notepad a “salt water soaked pulp”. But, amazing as his tale of survival
was, what he typed from it was no pulp fiction.
Hermes Bay portable typewriters were general issue for US war correspondents and military staff. Here is AP’s Don Whitehead using one to write his story of the landing at Anzio Beach in Italy, from a fox hole in February 1944. The US military signed a contract deal for the Hermes Baby before the American-made Smith-Corona Zephyr went into production, just before the outbreak of World War II.
At Associated Press headquarters in New York City, reporter
Don Whitehead cobbled together a lengthy article on the heroism of two of AP’s
men covering the Pacific theatre, McDaniel and Clark Lee. It was published
under the headline, “Here’s the story of courage and AP men who get war news –
Lee, McDaniel flirt with danger”. The story opened, “There’s a bright flame of
courage shining out of the gloom of war’s misery, destruction and death … it
flares in the dispatches of correspondents watching the convulsions of a world
in conflict.” Whitehead described McDaniel as “quiet, scholarly” and “slim,
grave, prematurely gray”. Whitehead speculated that, “Perhaps, McDaniel got
some of his outward calm from the Chinese children with whom he played as a
child …”
Yates McDaniel as a boy in China
Unbeknown
to McDaniel, the day after he left Bangka one of the most appalling incidents
of the Pacific War occurred on the island – the rape and murder of Australian
Army nurses. The Bangka Island massacre, indeed, remained unreported and
unknown until 1947. On February 16, 1942,
Japanese soldiers machine-gunned 22 nurses and 60 Australian and British
soldiers and crew members who had survived the sinking of Vyner Brooke by Japanese bombers. One nurse and two soldiers were
the sole survivors of this outrage.
At the Bomana war cemetery in
Papua New Guinea in late December 1943, Yates McDaniel, left, is among
comrades paying their last respects to Australian war correspondent Pendil
Arthur Rayner, who was killed in a plane crash.
Yates McDaniel died in St Petersburg, Florida, on March 14,
1983, aged 76. After the war he continued working for AP, becoming the news
agency's bureau chief in Detroit before going to Washington DC, where he worked
for 22 years before retiring in 1971. He also wrote for The New York Times.
