Free Eve of a Hundred Midnights by Bill Lascher Page A

journalists bore witness, including a New York Times reporter named Tillman Durdin. Reporting from Nanking in 1937, Durdin observed citywide looting, summary executions, enslavement of able-bodied men, rapes, and other crimes. In one of his most shocking accounts, Durdin said he saw 300 men lined up against a wall and shot.
    After Japan conquered Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s government retreated to Chungking, a distant, hilly city to the southwest. Meanwhile, a former ally of Chiang’s, Wang Ching-wei (Wang Jingwei), made a separate peace with Japan. Wang set up a collaborationist government, the Reorganized National Government of China. It claimed to represent all of China, but in reality it controlled only the Japanese-occupied portions of the country and was subject to the occupiers’ dictates.
    Wang’s underlings set up a network of spies and secret police in Shanghai’s International Settlement and the French Concession. Often coordinating their work with Japan’s secret agents and frequently enlisting the help of Shanghai’s expansive criminal underground, these agents operated out of nightmarish 76 Jessfield Road—a feared house that Wang’s enforcers used for beatings, flagellation, electrocution, and other torture.
    Early in 1939, the Kuomintang government in free Chinahad infiltrated Shanghai’s police network and assassinated a string of high-profile collaborators. Wang’s shadowy alliance of criminals and secret police retaliated by cracking down in the city. This crackdown included threatening Shanghai’s press corps.
    Though the United States had not yet entered the war, such threats weren’t new to American journalists in Shanghai, as the writer Paul French detailed in his Through the Looking Glass .
    â€œThings went from bad to worse to deadly,” French noted. Reuters reporter James Cox was murdered at a police station, and the New York Times ’s Hallett Abend—whom Mel would soon meet—was assaulted at Shanghai’s longtime press gathering point, the Broadway Mansions. Gould, the journalist whom Mel met just before arriving in Shanghai, was one of Japan’s frequent targets. As a result of numerous attempts on his life, Gould took many security precautions, like keeping heavily armed bodyguards outside his office and traveling everywhere in an armored car. Mel wasn’t terribly convinced about the usefulness of such precautions.
    â€œThe gunmen still get their newsmen,” Mel wrote of the reinforced concrete guard booths and the “tanks” he saw outside of newspaper offices.
    If Mel was at all frightened by the threats to journalists, he didn’t say so in his letters. It’s unlikely that he was. Instead, with Gould helping him make connections, Mel spent the better part of every day in Shanghai walking between news organizations to chat up editors, bureau chiefs, and correspondents.
    He also spent considerable time with Abend, a Stanford alum who, as likely the highest-paid foreign correspondent in Asia at the time, was also an avid art collector. A longtime stringer for the New York Times, he invited Mel to lunch at his apartment after a referral from Gould. Over “an A-1 lunch,” Abend showed off a collection of Chinese art worth thousandsof dollars. Mel bought some silk paintings from a dealer whom Abend regularly brought to his apartment, but he was most eager to discuss the correspondent’s work. Aside from contributing to the Times, Abend regularly wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications.
    Aside from Abend and Gould, Shanghai’s journalism community was dominated by what Mordechai Rozanski later dubbed the “Missouri Mafia,” an influential cadre of reporters who’d studied at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. This midwestern school didn’t just send a number of journalists to China—its faculty and administrators stayed intimately