Yangtze Patrol: American Naval Forces in China
A Selected, Partially-Annotated Bibliography

Yangtze Patrol!!

Merely hearing the words conjures images of exotic places, intriguing people, exciting adventures – and danger.

The Yangtze, Asia’s largest river, originates in the mountains of Tibet and flows eastward through the heart of China before entering the Pacific Ocean at Shanghai. For nearly a hundred years, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the United States Navy patrolled the river, protecting American citizens and interests. Few people know the history of those times. The Yangtze River Patrol Memorial Foundation, successor to the Yangtse River Patrol Association, was created to memorialize the ships and men of the Patrol and to foster scholarship into the role played by the United States Navy in the Far East.

Now, the Yangtze River Patrol Memorial Foundation has honored the Naval Postgraduate School’s Knox Library by selecting it as a repository for their book collection, records, and memorabilia. This is particularly appropriate given that the library’s namesake, Commodore Dudley Knox, commanded the gunboat U.S.S. Iris during China’s Boxer Rebellion of a century ago. The honor, we acknowledge, brings with it the Great Responsibility to care for the collection, to augment and improve it, to document it, and to make it available for scholarly researchers. The compilation of this modest bibliography is the first public step toward that goal. We hope this initial attempt will serve as a bedrock for greatly expanded and/or improved future versions.

The first issue we confronted was defining the breadth and scope of the material that would be included in this bibliography. For example, should it encompass material pertaining only to the Yangtze River Patrol or should it include the co-existing South China Patrol which operated further south along the coast at Canton? Should our purview expand to include the full Asiatic Fleet, of which the Yangtze Patrol was a part; or perhaps to the business and religious activities which provided the Patrol’s stated raison d’etre, or maybe even to the diplomatic negotiations and political decisions which made its establishment possible? And what about the fascinating magazine articles and books from that time period which, while not mentioning the Patrol, vividly and evocatively described the people and the scenes that the sailors would have encountered?

Then there was the problem of defining just how long the Yangtze Patrol existed. The U.S. Navy created an organization with the official name ‘Yangtze Patrol’ on 5 August 1921 with the stated purpose of “protecting U.S. interests, lives and property and to maintain and improve friendly relations with the Chinese People.” [Cable, p. 160]. However, the term is applied by some to include all U.S. Navy activities on the river dating back to the 1850’s. Kemp Tolley in the preface to his book, Yangtze Patrol, confidently states that “the Patrol carried out the longest single uninterrupted military operation in U.S. history, enduring without significant break for only twelve years short of a century.” [Tolley, preface]

A perusal of this “selected” bibliography will reveal, for now, a rather unfocused response to the above questions. Perhaps the eventual direction and scope of this work, as in the case of the Yangtze Patrol itself, will be an evolutionary process driven by public demands, official responses, and the aggregate human and financial resources available for the task.

Those who hunger for a definitive description of the Yangtze Patrol may appreciate a few selections from Robert W. Love’s History of the U.S. Navy which will help to put the Patrol in historical and political context while illustrating the difficulty in characterizing its composition and nature:

“…Most Americans who preached and traded in China lived in the Yangtze River basin, or in or around one of South China’s great treaty ports. For nearly a century their activities had been periodically threatened by pirates, bandits, antiforeign rioters, warlords, and anti-Peking rebels. As a result, in the 1858 Treaty of Tsiensin the United States demanded that China give U.S. navy warships the right to navigate the rivers of China “in pursuit of pirates” and the freedom to “visit all ports.” The first patrol on the Yangtze River was conducted in 1854 [emphasis added], and over the years these operations increased in frequency as Peking’s ability to keep order declined under pressure from the warlords, Japan, and Europe’s interventionists.

“…American merchants, missionaries, educators, and their dependents … legal rights were first secured in the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia and later in a succession of equally one-sided agreements culminating in the Boxer Treaty of 1901. When revolution broke out, therefore, American policy embraced some profound contradictions. On 10 July 1925, the State Department told London that [President] Coolidge expected “strict adherence” by China to the extrality and tariff treaties, but the president also instructed Secretary of State Kellogg not to use force to interfere in China’s internal affairs. On the other hand, the White House could not abandon Americans preaching and trading in China, and Kellogg repeatedly declared his determination to protect their lives and property.”

“The Navy provided the principal means for achieving these objectives.” [Love, page 566]

A few other explicative paragraphs from Love may serve to illustrate the ebb and flow in the Patrol’s history:

“After the Boxer Rebellion was crushed in 1900, American gunboats routinely patrolled the Yangtze and policed the South China coast. The Boxer Treaty also led to the posting of a large marine legation guard in Peking and an Army regiment at Tsiensin forty miles to the east. Nonetheless, the China station was always an isolated outpost. In 1902, the Asiatic Squadron was ungraded [sic] [upgraded?] to fleet status, but two years later Theodore Roosevelt withdrew all battleships from the Far East.

“Admiral Coontz had abolished the Atlantic fleet and consolidated all the battleships into the U.S. Fleet on the Pacific coast in 1922, but he did not disestablish the Asiatic Fleet. It was charged with defending the Philippines and Guam and with upholding the Open Door Policy in China

“Over the years the Asiatic Fleet’s Yangtze Patrol and South China Patrol remained fairly weak, despite the increasing danger to American interests that came hard on the heels of the Manchu dynasty’s collapse in 1911, the subsequent outbreak of civil war, and Japan’s adoption of a policy of muscular expansionism. When a real crisis appeared on the horizon in 1924, the entire Asiatic Fleet consisted of only one cruiser, twenty four-stack destroyers, twelve submarines, and eleven gunboats. Rear Admiral Charles B. McVay’s Yangtze Patrol maintained a supply depot at Hankow, the midpoint of its area of gunboat operations on the river; a smaller three-vessel South China patrol was stationed at Canton. The navy’s establishment in China was clearly not up to defending American interests in the far East. The Yangtze Patrol was ‘small and weak, merely a police force against banditry,’ admitted rear Admiral Yates Stirling …

“American nationals in China were sharply divided over the value of the patrols, many claiming that the gunboats stimulated Chinese agitation, others insisting that only the presence of Western naval forces prevented the Chinese from violating the treaties and slaughtering all foreigners.” [Love, pages 566 – 568]

Stanley Hornbeck, writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1928, described an incident in which the civilian participants presumably would not have equivocated in their feelings about the Patrol’s gunboats:

“When the premises were about to be rushed, the American Consul asked by signal that the gunboats in the river fire. American and British gunboats laid with mathematical precision a barrage which dispersed the attackers and covered the escape of the besieged party over the city wall. The patience of the Consul all that day, his resolution at four o’clock, and the prompt response of the gunboats appear to have been all that saved this party – men, women and children – from death.” [Hornbeck, pages 30-31]

Dr. Esson M. Gale’s 1955 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings article on the Yangtze Patrol makes interesting reading for someone who has time for only an essay-length overview. A unique feature of Gale’s article is the insight it provides into the family and leisure/recreational life of the naval officers:

“As a peace-time assignment, service on the Yangtze river was highly regarded by all navy men who knew. Welcomed by the civilian element in the international treaty ports naval officers and their families shared in the luxurious scale of living enjoyed by occidentals in China. Elaborately furnished apartments, with battalions of houseboys, cooks, and amahs for the children, could frequently be leased from the local European residents going on leave to their homelands. Rentals were phenomenally low, as were all other expenses. Curio and silk shops bulged with the choicest products of Chinese artistry at irresistible prices. Attractive clubs provided special recreational facilities for the foreign communities. The Shanghai Club and the spacious American Club were downtown institutions where local businessmen and officials, including the transient naval officers, gathered before tiffin for the customary gin-and-bitters. Navy wives were popular both at the clubs and in the drawing rooms. They introduced a refreshing note in styles and costumes to their sisters in exile.” [Gale, p. 307]

In contrast, enlisted personnel experienced a vastly different lifestyle:

“For the sailors, however, the sprawling International Settlement at Shanghai provided nothing in the way of entertainment but the sort of temptations one would expect to find in a city referred to by the British as a ‘sink of iniquity.’ Sordid and degrading conditions existed until the American communities of central China, particularly the American women’s organizations, became aroused and set out to provide clubs and respectable social contacts …” [Gale, p. 307]

References to this aspect of the American presence in China are relatively rare in the literature and it is to Gale’s credit that he at least made sanitized allusions to conditions for the bluejacket sailors, including a list of several communicable diseases that plagued them such as malaria, cholera, smallpox and, circumspectly, “many others not necessary to mention here.” [Gale, p. 309]

For those who crave more information than Gale’s article imparts, Kemp Tolley’s Yangtze Patrol delivers a fascinating book-length treatment of the subject. Thomas Buckley’s review of Tolley’s monograph in the Journal of American History manages, in a couple of paragraphs, to evaluate the book, encapsule the history and function of the Patrol, and inculcate some introspection regarding the existence and objectives of the riverine unit:

“… From the Susquehanna through the intrepid Monocacy to the ill-fated Paney [sic], American gunboats plied their way up and down the treacherous Yangtze in times of peace as well as war. Their officers and crewmen, performing what was obviously one of the most difficult and unrewarding tasks ever undertaken by the United States Navy, attempting to protect, and at times expand, American interests in China that were often as vague as they were vacillating. Dangers were faced with skill and courage; all were not strictly military, as noted by one crewman when asked what he did with his wages. He replied, “The most of it goes for likker and wimmen. The rest I spend foolishly.

“The book is a useful, well-written, and interesting account of an exotic chapter in American naval and diplomatic history; it is a most skillful and entertaining re-creation of days long past. Based largely on published reminiscences, official records, and articles from the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, the volume has great substance in its descriptive aspects. It is, however, lacking in analysis. The author clearly accepts the presence and function of the gunboats as necessary and justified; alternatives to “gunboat diplomacy” are not discussed, and seldom does the Chinese viewpoint appear in the narrative. With the rise of Chinese nationalism in the 1920s, the task of the gunboats became even more difficult and finally impossible although it was not the Chinese who pushed the gunboats out but the Japanese. American policies in the interwar period, despite outraged cries from those like American ambassador John van Antwerp MacMurray who admired gunboat diplomacy, relegated force to a secondary position. Useful in an earlier era, the gunboats had outlasted their time…” [Buckley, page 454]

Another book-length work worthy of special mention because of its unique perspective is Dennis L. Noble’s The Eagle and the Lion: The United States Military in China, 1901-1937. Noble, eschewing the more common discussion or description of events, opted instead for an in-depth study and evaluation of the individual sailors, marines and soldiers who served in China; his book is an attempt to not only evaluate them as military men but to actually examine how they lived and how they thought.

For a hundred years American sailors in China followed the ever-changing and sometimes conflicting orders of their government. Fully appreciating the Yangtze Patrol requires understanding many decades of American/Chinese relations placed in context with the rest of world history. The Yangtze Patrol can’t be summarized adequately in just a few pages, but it is hoped that those whose imaginations and interest are fired by the brief descriptions above will find this still-incomplete bibliography a profitable place to begin their exploration into the Yangtze Patrol and the “interesting time” of which it was a part.

In creating this partially-annotated bibliography, the intent was that it should be an ‘entertaining’ as well as an ‘informative’ work. An attempt was made to select cogent snippets from the comments and works of others that would, when taken together, provide a sort of broad overview of the times, the issues, and the events. In other words, a reader who knew nothing about the Yangtze Patrol could peruse this bibliography and come away not only enlightened and intrigued but also motivated to delve into some of the works cited herein. The current product is only a poor approximation of the original concept but it is hoped that time and funding will be available in the future for an enhanced version, involving an expanded number of pertinent citations, additional annotations and comments, and either a broadened or a narrowed scope depending on the opinions and advice of those who care about this period in the history of American/Chinese affairs.

One final note, books held by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Dudley Knox Library are identified by the letters “NPS/DKL” followed by location and call number information. Many of the journal articles and other items are also accessible in Knox Library. Consult with the reference or interlibrary loan departments in your local library for advice on obtaining any materials that interest you.

September 1998