Shore Battery

Early one morning last week, the 1,470-ton British sloop Amethyst steamed slowly up the Yangtze toward Nanking. On her starboard hand, massed for the assault across the river, lay the Communist armies. The Amethyst, with a 17-ft. Union Jack painted on each side of her grey steel hull, plowed the yellow-silted waters with assurance, a frail symbol of waning Western power in China. The Amethyst was to stand by the Chinese capital to protect British citizens. She never made it.

Near Rose Island, 60 miles below Nanking, two artillery shells from the Red-held north bank hit the Amethyst, crippled her bridge and wheelhouse. Rudder controls jammed. The Amethyst swung helplessly with the current; she ran aground on a bar near the island. Her four forward guns, facing the island, were useless, but her stern guns began to pour a methodical fire of 4-in. shells into the Communist positions. The shore batteries cut loose again. "It was a bit of a haze from then on," said one of the survivors.

Give It Back to the Bahstads. Within a few minutes the Amethyst's captain was mortally wounded; the ship's doctor and pharmacist's mate were dead. Another hit demolished a rear turret. The Amethyst ran up two white flags in clear token of surrender. But the shelling continued. The stricken captain ordered Chief Boatswain's Mate David Heath and 59 others, including the wounded, to abandon ship. Some reached the south bank in the Amethyst's whaler, others swam. Once on the south shore, they crawled into Nationalist territory. Said Heath: "The Reds machine-gunned and shelled us. We lost a couple of chaps that way." With the help of the Amethyst's Chinese mess boy as interpreter, most of the fugitives made it to the railroad, arrived in Shanghai the next day.

Aboard the Amethyst, other wounded and the dead still lay on the deck. The British destroyer Consort had started from Nanking at the Amethyst's first S O S, to succor the stranded crew. The Consort was flying seven large British flags. She, too, was fired upon by the Reds, and retaliated with her 4 1/2-inch guns. "It was bloody awful," said a Cockney survivor from the Consort. "But we gave it back to 'em. I saw one of their nahsty damned 'owitzers blown right aht of its bloody emplacement. Sky 'igh it went, too. We must 'ave killed two or three 'undred of the bah-stads." (In London, the Admiralty later said of the Consort: "She silenced the opposition a bit.")

For 13 hours without a break, and much of the time without lights, the Consort's surgeon tended the wounded in a wardroom littered with bits of human tissue and bloodstained clothing. The wounded were lined up on deck waiting to receive treatment; Petty Officer Harry Greening stood patiently at the end of the line, with an injured hand. The Red fire got hotter. Greening moved up: "Excuse me, sir, but I think I ought to get looked after a bit sooner now. I've been hit again." He was; his kneecap had been shot away.

The Consort made three runs past the Amethyst in vain attempts to get a towline to her. She could not come nearer than 1,000 yards. After the third run, she headed downstream to Shanghai, where a guard of British and U.S. bluejackets and U.S. Marines attended the removal of the Consort's ten dead and two score wounded.

Bury the Dead. More help was sent from Shanghai. The Amethyst's sister sloop, the Black Swan, got abreast of Rose Island before she was driven off. The 10,000-ton cruiser London, which had raced up from Hong Kong, headed up the Yangtze. She never got within sight of the Amethyst. At short range, the Communists riddled the London's vulnerable superstructure; before she got back to Shanghai shells tore 22 holes in her portside and several in her starboard; one shell exploded in an ammunition locker. Built to fight at a range of three miles or more and to maneuver in open water, the heavily-armed cruiser was even more helpless than the smaller ships in the narrow river channel. Fifteen of her crew were killed, 23 wounded.

The Amethyst was still helplessly exposed to fire from the shore batteries. Some time during the second day of her ordeal, the crew succeeded in refloating the sloop, moved her to the comparative safety of a back creek. The body of her master--who died after ordering his wounded ashore--was taken from the ship and carried inland. Almost half of the Amethyst's officers and men still stood by their ship. An R.A.F. Sunderland flying boat twice tried to reach the Amethyst with medical aid and a chaplain to bury her dead. It was twice driven off by Communist gunfire. Finally, 17 crew members were buried in the murky waters of the Yangtze.

Altogether, 44 Britons had been killed in the river battles, an estimated 100 wounded. Insolently, the Red radio declared that the British "must pay compensation and apologize" for their "intervention." This week the House of Commons will debate the tragic episode; it was clear that at the most, Britain could protest to the Communist authorities, which would do no good to anybody. The Admiralty decided to reinforce Britain's Far Eastern Fleet. But the days when such an incident would have stirred the Empire to wrathful retaliation were gone.

In England, plain Britons took the job of protesting into their own hands. Communist Leader Harry Pollitt, who declared that the Amethyst had no business on the Yangtze anyway, was almost mobbed by angry British crowds. In Plymouth, sailors broke up a political meeting at which he spoke. While Pollitt barricaded himself in a cloakroom, 5,000 Britons outside shouted "Murderer!" At Dartmouth, another crowd tore the Red flag off the speaker's stand and burned it. The people chanted: "I'd like to get you on a slow boat to China." A middle-aged man handed Pollitt a noose. A note with it read: "Judas Iscariot was presented with one of these and used it. I invite you to do likewise."

The man was the father of one of the crew killed on the Consort.

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