Right now I am sitting surrounded by pre-war Navy Items. This is not my primary focus area, but you pick up one interesting item, and then another item attributed to the same man, and before long your the proud owner of a 1300 plus photo collection, paper work, paintings and other items. And it is all because I recognized a river in a blurry fragment of a photo the seller was offering as part of a larger group that was being broken up. The river is the Whangpoo, and the photo that caught my eye showed it running through what appeared to be an Asian city with smoke in the background. When the photo and 150 of its friends arrived, along with other bits and bobs I knew I was dealing with the record of a two cruise Asiatic Fleet sailor and Pearl Harbor survivor. So how much could I gather before the bulk was scattered to the four corners of the earth or prices sailed beyond my reach. It turns out, enough. Not everything, not even some of the more flashy items offered, but enough to honor the original owner and the ships he served upon. And in my opinion a good enough portion of one of the finest gunboat sailor groupings offered in a long time. So here I sit surrounded by a grouping that started with the idea of only buying one item and mushrooming into this.

 

I am intending to use this thread to highlight this large grouping to what turns out was a 30 year Navy man. And from it, provide links to a several different threads based upon the collection. Unfortunately, I came well through the dance and so missed out on medals and some rank. Furthermore, I had to watch as maps of Asian ports went because I did not think I could grab it all and I did want to ensure could get the albums of what I suspected were a good collection. As noted above there are several interesting features I found about this man’s career. Frist, he was a Pearl Harbor survivor. Second, he was an Asiatic Destroyer sailor who witnessed close up the 1937 Battle of Shanghai. And finally, and this is the cool part to me, he was a gunboat sailor deep up river during the exact time the Sand Pebbles was supposed to have taken place. He initially enlisted in 1919 but was out one year later with an “undesirable discharge.” Don’t ask me how, but by 1921 he is back in the Navy. For the next three years he is on several battleships (The two photo albums relating to his Battleship days were already gone when I got there). Following his battleship time and after a short spell on transports in which he sailed both east and west coasts, the Caribbean, Nicaragua and the Far East dropping off Marines at all these locations he went to China for his gunboat cruise.

Primarily the photographs I have can be divided between his gunboat days and his destroyer days. After his first China cruise it appears he stopped filling photo albums, concentrating instead on gathering pictures, but never put them into an album. So sadly no dragon album….

 

 

The earliest parts of the albums I own are filled with images of US Navy and foreign ships he encountered. He seemed to photograph every gunboat he saw including the old captured Spanish ones at the ends of their service life…the USS El Cano, USS Villalobos, and USS General Alava are all present. Here is a stunning shot of the bow of either the gunboat USS Helena or USS Wilmington in a Shanghai dry dock.

 

 

While aboard the USS Chaumont he witnessed the HMS Hood and HMS Repulse transiting the Panama Canal on their 1923-24 around-the-world cruise. Haunting that he caught in one of his photos, the general location the Hood would be struck by the Bismarck seventeen years later.

 

 

I was able to get his Chinese made scrap book at a decent price. He filled it primarily with articles from both “Our Navy” and “The Orient’ magazines. “The Orient” was a slickly produced magazine out of Shanghai that was a precursor for the marine’s “Walla Walla” several years later. An interesting scrap book, filled with what you would expect cartoons, poems, Navy news, China river news, and liquor labels.

 

 

The grouping also included two watercolor-on-silk paintings: one of the USS Edsall and the other shown here in partial view. These were executed by what is called a pierhead artist (see the Edsall link below). Although this detail is of a civilian ship it does have a military story that is linked to this sailor. The Dollar Line was a steamship company that had strong links to the Pacific trade routes. The company had several modern luxury liners that traveled across the Pacific regularly including the one shown here. The ship, the SS President Hoover, was accidently bombed by the Chinese during the 1937 Battle for Shanghai. Chiang Kai Shek, Chinas leader at the time was furious at his own Air Force for targeting a ship owned by the company of one of his good friends, until he learned the man that had ordered the attack was Claire Chennault...that however, is another story. Anyway the Hoover was repaired following its bombing and returned to service. On its next run from Japan, the Captain was told to avoid Shanghai and instead recalled to the safety of the Philippines. The Captain hoping to avoid the fighting on the Chinese mainland used an unfamiliar route that took the ship close to Taiwan where in stormy seas and doing some really bad navigation it ran aground hard. The ships passengers were ultimately evacuated under tough conditions as Japanese war ships ringed the area to assist. Unfortunately, a number of the Hoovers crew broke into the ships liqueur stores and got drunk and began terrorizing the female passengers and those already safely ashore. Eventually order was restored, although the Company and several passengers blamed the Japanese officials for refusing to allow the Hoovers officers to land ashore with their weapons to deal with the problem.

And here is the link to a painting of the USS Edsall that also came with this grouphttp://www.usmilitariaforum.com/forums/index.php?/topic/204817-in-honor-of-the-uss-edsall/

When word of the disaster reached the Philippines, the Navy immediately dispatched two destroyers: the USS Alden and USS Barker to assist in the rescue and to recover sensitive registered mail still in the Hoover’s vault. Here is one of those classic crew photos, in this case the crew of the USS Alden, taken in 1938 during a visit to what was French Indochina. Our sailor joined these men shortly after she returned from providing security for the wreck at the end of December 1937. Unlike the other four stackers he was on, the Alden survived World War II.

 

 

The grouping came with a series of radio press messages while he was aboard the destroyer USS Edsall during and after the 1937 Shanghai incident. Highlighting world events, copies must have been posted on message boards in each Department of the ship allowing the crew to catch up on the latest news. Interesting again that the ship was receiving press reports about the fighting in Shanghai while the crew was witnessing the war firsthand, dockside in the Woosung River. Here is a detail of a radiogram that addresses the sinking of the Panay.

 

 

And sure enough buried within hundreds of loose images, a photo of the Panay early in her career.

 

 

As noted above his second tour in Asian waters had him on destroyers: The Pope, the Edsall and lastly the Alden. While on the Edsall, he was witness to the Battle of Shanghai and was most pleased to spot within the pile of photos on the ebay listing several blurry pictures that I ID’d as the city in flames. What I got was over 150 photos, many taken from the Edsall of the fighting.

 

 

Here is his dragon stamp. In my collection I have stamped papers from Marines with stamps made in the Far East, but have never had the opportunity to own one of these little stamps.

 

 

The seller also had a series of charts and maps of the Chinese coast but I was only able to get this one of North China produced by the Imperial War Office in England in 1924, and sold through the French Bookstore in Peking. These were the same type of War Office maps (but a different scale) that the Peking Marine Mounted Detachment used.

 

 

Just prior to World War II he was assigned to the USS Tangier, a seaplane tender, at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. A part from missing out on his medals, sadly he kept nothing recording his witnessing the attack on Pearl Harbor apart from a small snippet from the ships newspaper or information bulletin noting the capture and exploitation of the small midget subs the Japanese used in the attack. There is however a sizable stack of papers recording the operating instructions for the USS Tangiers engine room, a few ships newspapers and a congratulations message for their support during the Peleliu campaign. Here is what I believe is an image that came with the group of a near miss on the ship.

 

He did save a series of maps, including this one of Peleliu Island, in which the ship provided support. Don’t know anything about these. He would remain on the Tangier until early 1945.

 

 

And here is a little shot of either the USS Guam or USS Tutuila. While I finish building my Sand Pebbles Thread (thanks Steve!)

I believe he left active service in 1946 and retired from the reserves in 1950. Initially, he settled near Hampton Roads Virginia, but returned in the mid 1950’s to live near his sister in the town he was born in northeast Pennsylvania. I do not believe he was ever married and it seems spent his days doing some type of machinist work and traveling the east coast fishing. Although not a historically important grouping, history will record him as “being there’ during a number of significant events spanning a good portion of the globe.

 

 

Amazing !! Show us more when you can!!

I've said it before...you're far to familiar with bricks and streams! Some great stuff it led to, though

Brig your far too right, although this time it paid off.....and now you see why....still can't believe how massive this thing is....he photographed everything he must have seen on the river.....

Great pics and story, Dirk! Even if he wasn't a Marine! Congrats on pulling it together. The gun boat pics are awesome! Bob

Thanks guys!

Bob better gun boat pictures are coming in a Sand Pebbles 2 thread I plan on doing.

Both this thread and the one for the Edsall are simply fantastic...thank you for taking the time to post them!

Thanks Dave!...hope to do two more threads from this grouping

"Hello Engines, my name is Jake," Can't wait to see more!! "Well shoot something!"

 

Nice job on recovery and collection of this historic grouping.

Thanks Kurt. It is all here and when you look at the images in their entirety, you realize just how good they did in making that movie. A part from placing a Scottish soldier at the bar in Changsha, and a slightly smaller and less busy Shanghai Bund, that movie was IMHO perfect....in the look and feel....between the original story, the Director, the technical adviser and of course the high quality of the actors I am not sure a better movie could ever be made about gunboats.