Shanghai to the Marines

Last week may have marked the beginning of the end of one of the strangest cities in the world: Shanghai. At the close of the Opium War, in 1842, Great Britain took title to some unattractive mud flats between Soochow Creek and the Whangpoo River near the mouth of the 3,200-mile-long Yangtze. On those flats a metropolis spawned, a city not of one nation but of the world, where British taipans played polo in the long afternoons, where tough, good-humored American businessmen talked baseball, poker and politics, where short French soldiers laughed with not quite proper young ladies at the Cercle Sportif Franc,ais, where Russian princes turned barbers and German barbers turned princes. It became a city of American complexion--of skyscrapers, streetcars, movie houses, as foreign to China as a city of bamboo huts and Buddhist temples would be on the marshes of the Chesapeake.

But if the body of Shanghai was international, its backbone was British. The city's really big names--Sassoon, Macnaghten, Keswick--were British; so were its attitude toward natives, its philosophy of polite but huge profits, and, in the last three years, the main part of its resistance to Japanese imperialism.

Last week that resistance crumbled. In Tokyo, 126 (out of 466) members of the lower house of the Diet signed a petition denouncing Britain's "unpardonably atrocious" act in arresting nine Japanese as a retaliation for Japanese arrest of 15 alleged British spies. Next day the British War Office announced the withdrawal from Shanghai of Britain's garrison, about 1,500 effectives of the Seaforth Highlanders, East Surreys and various technical corps. Decision for this move was thought to have been taken at least two months ago, because of the realization that Great Britain, fighting for its life in the Occident, could not possibly put up a winning fight east of Singapore.

This left Shanghai in the hands of some 1,200 U. S. Marines, a negligible French garrison and an overwhelmingly superior Japanese force. Shanghai's senior foreign officer became Rear Admiral Moriji Takeda, who could presumably ask for and take over the "defense" of the International Settlement. Since the U. S. could not and would not assume responsibility for fighting off the Japanese alone, Shanghai's International Settlement last week was as good as surrendered. Shanghailanders knew that they had lost their queer hybrid foreign city, not quite 100 years old.

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