The Housekeepers

In China the U.S. Marines were busy at a traditional chore: carrying out a tidying-up expedition on a foreign shore. The forces involved numbered some 53,-ooo--almost three times the size of the whole Marine Corps in 1939. They were the Third Amphibious Corps, who had been landed on the coast of northern China (see FOREIGN NEWS).

The Corps' commander, rugged sy-year-old Major General Keller Emrick Rockey. veteran of World War I, Haiti, and Nicaragua, had bossed the 5th Division at Iwo Jima. His China mission, as he saw it: clean out the Japs, secure the ports for the arrival of U.S. ships with Chinese

Nationalist soldiers, open the railway which feeds coal from the northern coalfields to resurgent Shanghai. He made his headquarters in sprawling, ugly Tientsin.

Peck's First. With him in Tientsin was the famed ist Division which invaded Guadalcanal, New Britain, Peleliu and suffered its worst casualties at bloody Okinawa. Few if any veterans of those grisly days were still on hand, but the new men were the same kind of businesslike marines. Under Rockey and grey-haired, peppery Major General Dewitt Peck, who commanded the famous 4th Marines at Shanghai before the war, they cleaned up and settled down.

Barracks occupied by the Japs were foul. The marines rolled up their sleeves, scri-bbed, swept and disinfected. The Chinese cooperated. Mayor Chang Ting-erh broadcast orders to the citizens: "No gypping." The Red Cross took over the sturdily built German Club and made it into "the finest serviceman's club west of San Francisco."

Shepherd's Sixth. The other arm of Rockey's Corps, the 6th Division, was dumped into Tsingtao* under command of Major General Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr., stocky, energetic veteran whose great hobby is swimming under water to spear fish. His 6th had undergone its worst ordeal on Okinawa, at Sugar Loaf Hill--one of the decisive local battles of the war.

Like the ist, the 6th was reenforced with artillery, tanks, engineers, pioneers, medicos, service troops. For however long was ordered, they had come to stay--in tidy, professional marine style.

*Tsingtao has good claims to being the fastest growing city in China. In 1898, when the Ger mans grabbed it, it was an insignificant fishing village; today its 800,000 population is well housed in structures which sprawl over the hills above the best natural harbor in China. Scenically it is beautiful. Architecturally it is wholly un inspiring: late igth Century German colonial, plus nondescript modern Japanese and Chinese.

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