Looking Back: Shipmates on the old China Station
By Paul Stillwell

Reprinted with permission from United States Naval Institute
Naval History Magazine, May/June 1999

It was a pleasant experience on a recent Sunday evening to take in the three hours of The Sand Pebbles, on of the greatest Navy movies ever.  That led to my rereading of Richard McKenna’s classic 1962 novel on which the movie was based.  The movie was faithful to the book’s exceedingly well told story.  Even more than the captivating plot, the tale is filled with the atmosphere of a Navy that is long gone but one that also had its timeless qualities. 

     Before he was a professional writer, McKenna was a career machinist’s mate.  In the late 1930’s, he served in the Yangtze River Patrol gunboats Asheville (PG-21) and Luzon (PR-7).  He developed an abiding affection for propulsion machinery, which he bequeathed to Jake Holman, the protagonist of the Sand Pebbles story.  McKenna combined the knowledge gained from his own experience, oral histories from shipmates, and a prodigious amount of research.  The result, though fiction in format, is loaded with truth.

    McKenna’s writing is so vivid that readers feel they are on board the USS San Pablo, a gunboat taken over from the Spanish at the turn of the century. With Chinese coolies doing the grunt work, the U.S. sailors enjoyed the good life.  Holman disliked the military aspects of the job but enjoyed the work on the triple-expansion reciprocating engine, the comforts on board, and the camaraderie. 

     The author’s narrative rings true about the relationships among shipmates, both on board and ashore.  He throws in many shipboard details as well, such as the pinch of salt sprinkled in engine room coffee, to replenish that lost from sweat; the proper way to fire a boiler so the coal burned evenly; and the custom of “smokestacking,” whereby sailors came back fro liberty and got away with things by pretending they were more drunk than they really were. 

     McKenna also captured the essence of faction-ridden china early in the century.  It was a nation that essentially was treated as a divided-up colony by overseas powers including the United States and Great Britain.  The U.S. Asiatic Fleet and Yangtze River Patrol operated in the Far East to show the flag, represent U.S. interests, and protect Y.S. lives and property.  The Chinese. For the most part, felt surges of nationalism and resisted the outsiders.

     The movie conveys visual images that the book cannot.  We see the sharp-looking old dress-white uniform that had a blue back flap.  We see the dragons embroidered on the insides of the cuffs of dress blue jumpers --- cuffs that could be turned inside out in a bar on liberty. We also see 20-year-old Candice Bergen playing missionary teacher Shirley Eckert opposite Steve McQueen’s Jake Holman.  Long before she ever played Murphy Brown, The Sand Pebbles showed her as a sweet innocent just embarking on a career.

     The Naval Institute’s oral history collection contains the stories of individuals who shared their memories of the Asiatic fleet and the old China Station.  Interviewing them provided a vicarious window into the activities of a fleet that die with the Japanese onslaught to 1942.  Two of them were shipmates in the Asiatic fleet flag allowance, on board the heavy cruiser Augusta (CA-31).

     Cecil King served as a yeoman.  He had a rooster tattooed on one foot and a pig on the other – an old superstition to avoid drowning.  One of McKenna’s characters died a fictional death despite having the same tattoos.  King did better in real life.  In the early months of war, he left three different ships shortly before they were sunk.  He was reported missing and thus had the pleasure of reading his own obituary, knowing it wasn’t true. 

     Dick Harralson was a radioman serving the fleet command. He enjoyed the times ashore in Shanghai so much that he extended his enlistment to remain in the Far East.  Many other sailors did so as well, especially in the period before he war when they decided to stay as “Asiatics” rather than returning to the U.S. fleet off California.

     But Harralson was not so lucky as King.  In 1941, he was transferred to a Navy radio station ashore in the Philippines.  He was captured on Corregidor in 1942 and spent the remainder of World War II as a prisoner.  After the war, he put the experience behind him and got on with his life and naval career.  He harbors no bitterness, and credits that fact for his continuing good health.  Other POW’s, he says, internalized hatred for the Japanese and suffered maladies for years afterward. 

     Fate put King and Harralson on differing paths after they left the Augusta and her successor flagship, the Houston (CA-30).  One became a prisoner, one stayed free to serve on shipboard duty later in the war.  But both still have vivid, pleasant memories of serving on the old China Station when it was a very special place for a small group of U.S. Navy men.  The two Augusta shipmates had many of the same experiences, as did McKenna’s Jake Holman.

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