Introducing A Danger Shared

The following text and images were excerpted from the introductory chapter to the book A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (Blacksmith Books, 2024), which features photography by wartime foreign correspondent Melville Jacoby and accompanying text by Bill Lascher, who wrote about Jacoby in the critically acclaimed 2016 book Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two WWII Correspondents and Their Epic Escape Across the Pacific (William Morrow & Co.).

The 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War had just passed when I began writing this introduction on September 11, 2020. That date also marked 104 years to the day since the birth of Melville Jacoby, the American foreign correspondent whose images of the war comprise the majority of those included in this book. Mel’s life was short but impactful, capped by a career a close friend called “as brilliant as it was brief.” That brilliance Mel devoted to covering the war and bridging the distance between two physically and culturally distant lands: the United States and Asia.

Mel documented the war and its impact as part of a broader mission to help Americans better understand China (and, later, the Philippines and the place then known as French Indochina). Having studied, lived and worked in China, Mel was understandably interested in how coverage of the war might influence Americans’ sympathy, or lack thereof, for his Chinese friends, neighbors, and colleagues. He also foresaw the weighty implications of the conflict for the United States. Interdependencies and connections had been evolving between Pacific-facing nations before the war. Mel understood this impact on the Pacific and how the conflict between the people and societies on one side of it increasingly mattered to those on its opposite shores.

That morning in 2020 I was, of course, writing amid another crisis: the Covid-19 pandemic. The coronavirus outbreak and responses to it were widening pre-existing political, social, and cultural rifts. This reminded me of a similar crisis, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920, which claimed Mel’s father’s life when Mel was just two years old. I put this collection together because our lives are more connected than we often realize or care to admit. Wherever and whenever we live, we deserve to have our stories remembered. Our memories are intrinsically valuable, but we are also better able to highlight our connections when we take effort to surface and preserve not just our own stories, but those around us.

The anniversary of the Second World War’s end passed quietly. Our year of contagion, political unrest, and climate catastrophe obscured any inspiring observances of the victory over fascism, moving appearances by veterans, or somber reflections upon atrocity and sacrifice that might have been. What could have been a year of remembrance instead was drowned out by the noise of “2020,” a term that became popular shorthand for calamity and left little room for memory.

Tens of millions of people were killed and displaced during the war in Asia, where the conflict’s global consequences still resonate. Still, Asia’s experience of the war remains largely an afterthought in other parts of the world. Even before the pandemic, the war in Asia was not widely remembered elsewhere. For three quarters of a century, countless tomes about World War II have dissected every nuance of the struggle for Europe, and most of those that don’t instead address America’s crusade through the Pacific. In the Americas and Europe at least, comparatively few titles document the conflict’s massive human and economic toll in Asia, where fighting began two years before Germany invaded Poland and four years before that infamous Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Melville Jacoby at the Press Hostel

Melville Jacoby sits in front of the ruins of the Press Hostel in Chungking in the summer of 1941. In the photo, Mel clasps a flashlight, suggesting he’d just returned from one of the city’s dark, dingy air raid shelters or was prepared to enter one at short notice.

Melville J. Jacoby Press Hostel calling card (fron

The Chinese-language side of Jacoby’s card

Press Hostel calling card (reverse)

Melville Jacoby’s calling card while working in Chungking (Chongqing), China, circa 1940-1941

This collection can’t fix that reality, but it may help resurface the story of Asia’s experience of the war while reviving the memory of those who tried to chronicle it. Many of the images you see within this collection have never been published. Curating and interpreting them has expanded my knowledge of World War II, shifted my understanding of war in general, and deepened my appreciation for those who sacrifice their lives to document world-rending moments.

The Faces I see every day

A photograph of mostly Chinese nationals photographed by Melville Jacoby, who wrote “The Faces I See Every Day” on the back of the print. Mel likely made this image while a student at Lingnan University in Canton (Guangzhou), China, in the 1936-1937 school year.

That deepening began twenty years ago, when my grandmother — Mel’s cousin — gave me a typewriter that used to belong to him. I was in my early twenties. As I learned more over the ensuing years, that story has maintained a presence in my mental landscape. Learning about Mel was at first an excuse for me to spend time with my grandmother. She’d ended up with most of his possessions, and each time I visited, I learned a bit more about him. By 2016 I’d gathered enough material to write my first book, Eve of a Hundred Midnights (William Morrow), which describes Mel’s life, his romance with the equally remarkable journalist Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, and their escape together from the doomed Philippines.

As interesting as those two were, there was a bigger story to tell. That book really only touched upon a small segment of what’s contained in the hundreds, maybe thousands of photographs, letters, and notebooks of Mel’s I’d grown to look forward to seeing at my grandmother’s house (let alone elsewhere). Mel and Annalee’s story was worthy of a book, but leaving out all this other material did a disservice to the work they and the people close to them produced. These young, passionate reporters had written exhausting, illuminating accounts of the war — both for private and public audiences. They also captured vivid images of conflict as well as the beguiling way everyday life persists in spite of it. What good were these chronicles they’d devoted their lives to capturing if they remained stuffed in some closet in California for decades?

I regularly reflect on what didn’t make it into my book’s pages. I’ve focused on telling other stories since, but part of me still thinks about the ones Mel told, the ones he didn’t tell, and the ones nobody had a chance to tell. More than any of that, I wonder about what stories I don’t even know about, which stories were left untold and forgotten by the world.

This volume offers a chance to revisit some of these stories. Though Melville Jacoby worked primarily as a writer, he rarely went anywhere without a camera. The images he made over the course of his time in Asia reflect increasing comfort behind the lens. After closely examining thousands of his prints and negatives and other related collections, I’ve selected an assortment of pictures that I believe convey a sense of the world he and millions of people whose lives he chronicled experienced.

The images Mel captured reflect increasingly intimate portraits of China and its neighbors, even in their most dire moments. Candid depictions of everyday life seem ever more natural over time, though occasionally Mel’s lens reflects faces frozen in discomfort under his gaze. In some images, Chungkingers pause amid piles of rubble and chaos-filled streets — sometimes seemingly while racing to or from a barrage of bombs — to gawk at the westerner stopping to take their pictures amid the peril. It’s never quite clear whether they’re bothered, or even offended, by his presence, if other concerns have furrowed their brows, or if expressions that appear frozen for eternity as troubled looks were in fact transitory moments that passed as quickly as the shutter’s snap.

This is an imperfect and unbalanced collection. Like any storyteller’s, visual or otherwise, Mel’s career — and his eye — evolved. Hence: “A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War.” Would that Mel had taken as many pictures of Japan when he visited it at the outset of the war as he would in Chungking three years later. I wish I didn’t have to wonder which subjects Mel simply overlooked and which he elided out of fear of losing tenuous employment. It will remain a mystery what images from Southeast Asia might have survived had Mel’s dogged work not made him wary after death threats and an arrest outside Haiphong on espionage charges. And, of course, we’ll never know what was lost on New Year’s Eve, 1941, when Japanese forces approached Manila, leaving Mel and his Time Inc. colleague Carl Mydans with no option but to incinerate their reporting material in a hotel basement. For that matter, even though Mel provided the first pictures most Americans saw of their countrymen’s desperate fighting on the Philippines’ Bataan peninsula and of those soldiers’ stubborn resistance on Corregidor, I wish I could see what images of these and other embattled places he lost during his final perilous escape from the Philippines when he was forced to ditch everything but what he could carry.

War Map of China

Residents of Chungking study a large public map of China with information about aerial battles, bombing raids, and other updates about the war with Japan

Soldiers marching

A column of Chinese soldiers parade through a city street somewhere in China, likely Chungking, circa 1940-1941

Woman cooking in Chungking

A woman prepares blocks of tofu while other food cooks at a stall in Chungking

While I am originally a writer and reporter, the time I’ve spent examining Mel’s life and work sparked a personal interest in photography, archival work and preservation. I mention this to emphasize that while I’ve done my best to faithfully capture the originality of the images presented here, I have little prior professional experience in these fields. I have digitally removed dust and scratch marks introduced while scanning images, slightly adjusted tone where necessary for some images, and, with a handful, made minor crops that don’t change what I believe were the pictures’ intended composition or content. I’ve clearly labeled the few instances where I’ve made any significant adjustments. I took great care to remain faithful to each original and I think I was successful in doing so, but I also think it’s essential that I note that these are not totally untouched images.

What you see here is an incomplete record, as is any history or other collection of images and text. My understanding of Mel and the world he witnessed comes from examining his work, his correspondence, and what personal ephemera survived decades of travel, war, relocation, death and everyday life. I managed to glean invaluable perspective through conversations with a few people who met Mel and survived long enough for me to meet them. I augmented my knowledge of the context in which he worked (and the context that situates this collection) with primary sources from dozens of archival collections from journalists, academics, soldiers, sailors, politicians, and business people who grew up, lived, worked, loved or fought throughout Asia. That context was then deepened by readings from and discussions with countless other authors, historians, scholars and storytellers.

Soldiers with Stretchers

Chinese soldiers gather with stretchers on a rubble-strewn Chungking street after an air raid circa 1940-1941

Sisters on steps

China’s powerful “Soong Sisters,” Soong Mayling, Soong Ai-ling, and Soong Chingling during a tour of Chungking in April, 1940. The tour was part of a heavily publicized reunion of the sisters aimed at boosting Chinese morale during the war and cultivating sympathy from potential allies, including the United States

I cannot with complete certainty claim what any one image in this collection depicts, nor can I answer the countless questions each provokes. What was Mel trying to capture with a given photo? What moment had he hoped to record when he clicked the shutter button? Who were the people in front of his lens? Where were the places they occupied? Why were people in some images sifting through rubble or running from flames in others? Why were faces in some pictures full of tears and others brightened by smiles? What might have been left out of a frame? Where can such omissions be traced to Mel’s own actions as a photographer, and which can be explained by the haste and danger of war? What about entire images that might have been omitted? Which were left out because of Mel’s own decisions and which omissions can I attribute to the simple havoc wrought upon memory and history by the passing of years?

Multiple lenses filter my understanding of World War II in general and the war in Asia specifically. These filters include Mel’s own decision-making about what images and events to record as well as the time that passed between these decisions and my first learning of Mel’s story decades later. I mention these layers of filtration neither to excuse mistakes nor evade scrutiny, but to acknowledge that I don’t intend this collection as a definitive record of either the war or Mel’s career. Instead, I hope this project serves to prompt discussion and examination.

Hanoi canal

Residents of Hanoi, Tonkin, French Indochina (present-day Vietnam) walk along a dirt road next to a canal in the fall of 1940

I’ve been able to confirm what some of these images depict by triangulating Mel’s work with other sources, but some were more difficult to assess. Where I can confidently identify someone, or some place, or some moment, I have done so. Where I have a strong hunch of how to label an image, yet lack certainty, I have so indicated. Other images will be left to interpretation, but I included them because they remain intrinsically powerful. Perhaps you’ll wonder, for example, why sorrow seems to shadow some faces, while others betray a joy that seems impossible among all the destruction and horror. Maybe the way moments of serenity seem to persist even as tumult surrounds people will remind you of similar dichotomies in your own life. Perhaps there will be emotions on some of these faces with which you can identify, as I have many times.

Japanese tank in Hanoi

Onlookers watch a Japanese tank drive through Hanoi in the fall of 1940. After briefly resisting Japan’s efforts to move troops into French Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), French colonial forces controlled by the Vichy regime acceded to Japanese pressure. Following its signing of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, Japan moved thousands of troops into Indochina to cut off China’s access to munitions and other supplies

Flower seller in Hanoi

A vendor at a flower stall in Hanoi looks at a bouquet of light-colored flowers. Fall, 1940

Guerrilla with rifle

A man in local attire poses with a rifle on a bridge somewhere in French Indochina, likely near the Mekong River along the border of Laos and Thailand in December, 1940

French soldiers marching with rifles

French soldiers march with service rifles slung over their shoulders after a skirmish with Japanese troops near the town of Langson at the border of French Indochina and China in September 1940

Ultimately, I hope this collection reignites interest in a period and region worthy of deeper, sustained, and expansive discussion. We live in an an era when, I believe, we all would benefit from reflecting on history. Perhaps this collection will also prompt readers to think about stories in their own worlds that remain untold or under-appreciated, and to reflect upon how our past provides perspective on our present and informs our future.

Philippine villagers on the shore

Residents of a village somewhere in the Philippines (likely Pola, Mindoro Oriental) watch from a beach as passengers of the freighter Princessa de Cebu escaping from the fortified island of Corregidor sail to shore. Among those escapees were Mel and Annalee Jacoby

Our contemporary world often feels fraught with hostility, fear, and tragedy. Sometimes I think the shadows darkening our time are akin to those that roiled Mel’s. Ideally, this volume will help illuminate a corner of the world as it was, as it is, and as it could be. There are others who can more precisely describe and interpret what happened in Asia (and elsewhere) during the period examined in this volume. This work admittedly interprets a recollection that has passed through three generations of my family’s memory and has been informed by my own professional experience as a journalist. It is not a removed, impersonal analysis. Even if it were, I didn’t experience the war, nor do I have direct connections to the cultures examined in this volume or the people who did.

Mel and his colleagues strived to accurately cover the war despite real threats and dangers. He risked everything to continue telling this story, he understood that doing so required professionalism, and he knew that expertise mattered because it strengthened value of the reports and images he and his peers recorded.

Aware of that intention as well as my own limitations, I have taken care to fairly and truthfully present these images in order to maintain that value. We must still fight to keep the story Mel helped tell visible and to retell it, even imperfectly, lest we risk repeating its darkest chapters.

Bill Lascher

September, 2023

Mel and Annalee in Uniform

Melville and Annalee Jacoby sitting together in a blacked-out hotel room somewhere in Australia (likely Menzies Hotel in Melbourne), April 1942, shortly after their escape from the Philippines aboard a blockade runner. Each wears uniforms issued by the U.S. Army to accredited correspondents, as indicated by the embroidered “C” visible on Mel’s shoulder. Annalee, then a contributor to Liberty Magazine, was the first woman accredited by the army in the Pacific Theater. Mel was Time Magazine’s Far East Bureau Chief.

A Selection from The Golden Fortress

The following excerpt comes from Chapter 1 of my latest book, The Golden Fortress: California’s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees, published Aug. 9, 2022, by Chicago Review Press. If you’d like to read the rest of the chapter, and the book, I have a limited number of signed editions available for purchase here, or you can order the book from Bookshop or your favorite retailer. The audio book is also available from Libro.fm and other sellers, and ebooks are available in EPUB, PDF, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Apple Books and Google Play.

A CLOUDLESS SKY BLANKETED ALTURAS as a string of sedans turned off Highway 299.

Temperatures that afternoon had briefly crept above freezing but dipped again as dusk arrived. From atop a three-story brick building at the other end of Main Street, the word HOTEL blazed against the cloudless sky. On an evening as clear as that one in early February 1936, the beacon of the signage must have been a welcome sight to the cars’ occupants as they drove those last three blocks from the highway to the Niles Hotel, hundreds of miles, two days, and a world away from home. That those last three blocks also composed the entirety of downtown Alturas said everything about how far they’d traveled.

After the men parked their cars, they might have reflexively shivered beneath their polished leather jackboots and thought of the all-year warmth and sun they’d left behind. If any of the men passed beneath the street lamp at the corner of Modoc and Main Streets, its glow might have glinted across the gold-toned badges they carried, illuminating an eagle’s wings spread above the words POLICE OFFICER and LOS ANGELES typed in blue lettering beneath, and the embossed seal that read, CITY OF LOS ANGELES. FOUNDED 1781.

Once inside the Niles Hotel, thirteen Los Angeles police officers waited as their commanding sergeant, R. L. Bergman, checked them into the hotel. The next morning they would officially begin their new assignment here in the seat of Modoc County, six hundred miles away from the City of Angels. Somehow, despite traveling so far, the officers still hadn’t left the Golden State.

A cultural distance matched the physical distance. Alturas was Modoc County’s largest town and still remote from the nearest settlements of any size. The hotel was at the southern end of downtown, which ended a few hundred feet away at a small bridge over the gurgling Pit River. It was surrounded by the kind of businesses typical of a certain mythologized small town in the early twentieth-century American West: a coffee shop next door, a butcher down the block, a liquor store up the street, and an inn across Main Street with signage advertising BUFFALO BEER on tap. The county courthouse was just a couple blocks northeast of the hotel. A few businesses fronted East and West Carlos Street. The rest of the nearby streets were residential. The surrounding sparse, frigid, mostly undeveloped expanse where the men would work for the foresee- able future dramatically contrasted with the bustling, sun-bathed metropolis they’d left two days prior, but their task remained the same as it had been at home: protect and serve the City of Los Angeles.

Soon after the officers arrived at the Niles Hotel, a primly dressed woman walked in and introduced herself to Sergeant Bergman. She was Gertrude Payne French, the publisher of the Alturas Plaindealer. Could she just interview the sergeant for a little bit about why the police had come all the way to Modoc County from Los Angeles?

She could. Bergman knew how highly his boss, Los Angeles police chief James Edgar Davis, valued good publicity. And Homer Cross, Davis’s deputy in charge of crime prevention and this operation’s key architect, had softened the ground throughout the state in the weeks leading up to the deployed officers’ arrival.

French already knew why they were there, of course. Cross had talked to her when he came to Modoc County that January. Even if he hadn’t, French may have known, as she prided herself on how plugged in she was to events transpiring all across California. After all, she was one of the Native Daughters of the Golden West, a member of the Alturas Chamber of Commerce board of directors, and, like her husband, R. A. “Bard” French, a former operative in the state Republican Party. Gertrude and Bard were very encouraged, French told Bergman, that someone—Chief Davis—was finally doing something about the “penniless itinerants and criminals” plaguing the Golden State. Concerns about how out-of-town police might disrupt Modoc County were already spreading. The Plaindealer would diligently downplay these concerns on its pages, but, French told Bergman and would repeat in print the next day, the paper was “reserving our final judgment to see what happens.”

Whatever judgment ensued, numerous scenes like the one taking place at the Niles Hotel likely occurred throughout the remotest corners of California that evening. Davis had sent Bergman, the two seven-officer squads working under him, and 120 other Los Angeles police officers—each handpicked by the chief from a larger pool of volunteers—to seize control of the state’s borders. Each squad was stationed at one of sixteen entry points around the perimeter of California. Some would patrol highways and set up checkpoints to stop incoming cars, while others boarded trains to look for fare evaders and stowaways. All those entering California who appeared unable to support themselves and likely to become public charges or who the officers believed likely to be criminals would be stopped. No one was to get through without permission from the Los Angeles Police Department, even if Los Angeles itself was hundreds of miles away.

Los Angeles police chief James Edgar Davis and Los Angeles County superior court judge Minor Moore present Los Angeles mayor Frank Shaw with a Texas-shaped birthday cake on the eve of Davis’s rollout of his border blockade. Courtesy of Los Angeles Times Photograph Collection, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA

Perhaps Chief Davis, originally from Texas, thought of the deployment’s launch as a birthday gift for his boss, Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw. That Saturday morning, Davis sat down with Shaw, not to celebrate his birthday but to discuss the blockade, just as someone wheeled a sixteen-pound birthday cake into the mayor’s office. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Minor Moore—also a transplant from the Lone Star State, and president of the Texas Society of Southern California—was the enormous dessert’s likely mastermind. Moore, who called Shaw to wish him a happy birthday just as the cake arrived, had conspired with Shaw’s Texas-born wife, Cora; his mayoral counterpart in Dallas, George Sergeant; and officials from the Texas Centennial Exposition, who actually paid for the giant confection.

As mayor and police chief, respectively, Shaw and Davis were among Los Angeles’s most prominent public figures. Before becoming mayor, Shaw, a grocery-chain executive and one of California’s wealthiest politicians, was a Los Angeles County supervisor who led the county board’s efforts to blame Los Angeles’s fiscal woes on poor, unemployed migrants. Davis, a former chief of police who’d been re-elevated to the position when Shaw was elected mayor, made arresting homeless and other visibly poor Angelenos a key plank of his policing strategy. Both men could trace their success in part to the city’s obsession with drawing tourists (and their money) while simultaneously shunning poor migrants (and their need). Like other California cities, Depression-era Los Angeles treated transients as little more than parasitic threats. Indigent relief was burden enough for these cities’ own residents, the argument went. Why should they pay for other cities’ discards?

Reliant as their public rhetoric might have been on antimigrant sentiment, neither Davis nor Shaw were truly of Los Angeles. Between fleeing his native Texas and arriving nearly broke in Los Angeles, Davis spent many of his early years as a drifter, while Shaw was born in Canada and grew up bouncing around the Midwest. Neither likely discussed those backgrounds when they met at city hall three days before Davis’s officers arrived in Alturas.

The day after their meeting, Davis put an exclamation point on declarations that outsiders—or at least, the wrong kind of outsiders—just weren’t welcome in the City of Angeles. Davis deployed his border patrol, confident in a full-throated endorsement from Shaw. The chief also knew he could count on support from the Los Angeles powerbrokers who helped elect the mayor three years earlier and who for years had decried what they believed were “hordes” of transient “ne’er do-wells” invading the city. Now well into his second stint as Los Angeles’s police chief, Davis had Shaw to thank for his job.

Whether Davis conceived the operation as a favor to Shaw or not, the fervor with which he pursued it was hardly surprising. He cared little about misgivings lawmakers expressed about earlier proposed anti-indigent and anti- migrant measures. He also had no qualms that his officers might trample a few constitutional protections in their attack on criminality and the vagrants who he believed embodied it.

And it would make sense if Davis believed he owed something to the mayor. At the outset of 1930 Shaw’s predecessor, John C. Porter, had demoted Davis from chief to deputy chief after a series of high-profile scandals involving his department. After Shaw replaced Porter in 1933, one of his first official acts had been to put Davis back in power. In return, Davis carefully crafted his police department to serve as the primary municipal tool to guard the free-market-cherishing, business-friendly forces cherished by Shaw and responsible for his election.

Amid the economic turmoil and labor unrest of the Great Depression, Davis—while also sparking the Los Angeles Police Department’s inchoate development into a paramilitary force that would serve as the national standard for militarized policing—reveled in using the department’s power to harass and intimidate union organizers, civil libertarians, and political progressives. Now, the chief turned his attention toward the wretched souls washing across California’s borders from barren Dust Bowl farms and Depression-shuttered factories. To hear it from the agenda-setting Los Angeles Times, the city’s chamber of commerce, and Davis himself, these domestic migrants, if not already criminals, were likely to become criminals given enough time loitering on the streets of Los Angeles.

Davis’s plan would neutralize that threat with a phalanx of officers at California’s borders ready to block incoming laborers while the rest of his officers scoured Los Angeles’s streets for indigent transients and “vagrants.” After months of preparation, the plan was finally ready. Beginning that Sunday, February 3—a day after Shaw’s birthday—and continuing into the following afternoon, squad after squad of officers piled into personal cars, drove past the city limits, and continued to the farthest reaches of California, where they would assume their duties as the Golden State’s first line of defense from the uncivilized masses beyond.

Exploding Whales (Also, I Wrote a Book)

History is complicated. 

Writing about history is even more so. 

That's one reason I haven't written you in six months. Last time I checked in I was busily trying to complete my book...er ... (it has a new title. No, I can't tell you quite yet, but it looks good on the book's cover, which I can't quite show you yet). Well, I did. 

Then I wrote it again.

Then I wrote it again, again. 

Phew. My head hurts. My carpal tunnels hurt. My blood is mostly coffee sludge. I've become a master of doctoring up Top Ramen. I know the shame that is ordering pizza from a place three blocks away because I can't be bothered to stand up because this sentence is connecting with that one and this with this one and oh my god I'm actually writing, there are words coming out and they make sense and I actually think I have something here and wow I'm going to win the pulitzer and...

...crap. This is junk. What am I doing trying to write a book? I couldn't even write a postcard.  

What was I saying?

My brain is fried.

Something about whales? 

Look: 45 years ago today some people thought it would be a good idea to blow up a dead whale on a beach in Oregon. Well, it made for good TV, such good TV that decades later the footage was digitized into one of the first viral videos I ever saw. You should see it and read about it here.

Oh, oh! You should also read this. I wrote it! Did you know the United States used to have a fully-functioning court for U.S. citizens in China (well, fully-functioning is probably not quite the correct descriptor as there weren't juries)? It did! And, because of course this makes sense, most of its rules were based on codes for Washington, D.C., so, as one source noted for this story, you might see a case that said "so and so was brought up for pushing a Chinese into the Huangpu River contrary to the laws of the District of Columbia." It was a fascinating vestige of American colonial and legal history. By the way, Atlas Obscura is quite the wonderland for those interested in random history and geographical quirks. I'm thrilled to be published there and you should definitely explore more of the site.

Speaking of sites, I redesigned my web site since I last wrote. It's pretty. Give it a look! 

That's right, publishing! Wasn't I saying something about a book? 

Oh, yeah, so this one time, China and Japan were at war. Japan had conquered all of China's coastal cities, so China needed to get supplies to its wartime capital, Chongqing, an inland city that a long time ago was the capital of the Bā empire but was hardly known before the war. So China turned to France, or rather, a French colony called Indochina, which was made up of places we know today as Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. You see, there was this port city called Hải Phòng, though they wrote it Haiphong because Europeans weren't terribly keen on recognizing local accents and punctuation. Anyhow, there was a railway that would take supplies from Hải Phòng to a place in China called Kunming, a very lovely city next to a large lake where at the time you could buy chocolate. That was notable because you couldn't get chocolate in Chongqing, as one American named Mel Jacoby noted. Then again, he came down with malaria in Kunming, so maybe he wasn't as excited about the place as I'd like to think.

But I digress (shocking, I know). So in this port city in a place that we now call Vietnam, but back then called Indochina because it was under the thumb of the French, was a warehouse that an American company used to store goods it was going to ship up that railway. But, you see, Japan wasn't eager for China to have these goods. At first it bombed the railway. But then, in June 1940, Germany conquered France and a group of collaborators set up a government subservient to the Nazis in Vichy, a town with nice spas and supposedly-healthy water, and those collaborators said "oh, hey, what should we do with these colonies all over Africa and Southeast Asia? Hmm, let's not worry about it right now, especially not that Indochina place." Anyway, Japan's foreign minister at the time was this American-educated lawyer* who really hated Communists and he thought "Gee, these Nazis don't seem too fond of Communists either, maybe we should work with them" (Not a terribly unique sentiment among Japan's leaders), so he negotiated an alliance between Japan and Germany (and Italy, but who's counting?). They signed that alliance that September and lo-and-behold we have the Axis, a term that made coming up with shorthand for anyone American leaders wanted to demonize in the future super easy.

Like I was saying, there was this American cargo at a warehouse in the Vietnamese portion of Indochina, a colony run by the French, and the Japanese were trying to keep the Chinese from having this cargo. The French had been all, like, "Regarde, we don't have a chien in this guerre, we're just doing les affaires," mais non! Now they had business. Those dudes in Vichy were like "hey, the Germans say 'maybe you shouldn't anger these new allies of ours' [I don't know enough German for good, er, Germglish?]," though in a far more complicated, official, historically-accurate, but still quite waffly manner. However they said, the point was that they let Japan into Indochina. Thus allowed into Indochina, the Japanese occupied the warehouse where these shipments were coming, much to the annoyance of the Americans, who were neutral and flying their flag above the warehouse. 

Oh, yeah, at the same time, Thailand -- Aka the Kingdom of Siam -- was like, "hey, the other side of the Mekong River looks mighty nice to us. Maybe we'll just fly a few planes over there. What? Cambodia? We aren't invading Cambodia, which, of course, is part of Indochina, which, of course, is run by the French, who, of course, are under Germany's control, which, of course, is allied with Japan, which, of course, is at war with China." 

Darn. Digression. Sorry.

So, the Japanese are now inspecting U.S. goods at a Hải Phòng cargo terminal and that really didn't sit well with the Americans. That dude Mel had mostly recovered from his malaria and was hanging in a city near Hải Phòng called Hanoi. Mel stayed in a hotel called the Metropole, where all the Japanese and French and Americans and anyone else drank in the bar and talked too much about what they were doing. So of course Mel learned about this mess at the U.S. port and thought "hey, that's a story, right?" I mean, sure, he'd been telling his family and his then girlfriend that he was going to head home after a year in China, but come on, was he actually supposed to not check out what was going on at this warehouse? I mean, what possible harm could come form that?

Hmm... wouldn't you like to know? Good thing I wrote a book! 

I promise it doesn't read like this letter.

-Bill

P.P.S. I'm still stretching my dollars every which way. As you might be able to tell, my mind has been a little off and I forgot to mention: you're still welcome to share a few piastres.

* = Also keep your eyes peeled for the December issue of Portland Monthly for more about this dude, and a woman who was a much, much cooler representative of World War II history.