Continued from Part 1.

Strangers in a strange land, the Brits. No business being there, but these are the blokes they thought needed some help.

After one of those bitter winters, it would have been a nice warm day on May 12, 1937, when the XXth of Foot Lancashire Fusiliers in Tientsin trooped the colour and beat retreat to celebrate the coronation of King George VI. Lt Col RFH Massy-Westropp’s 1st Battalion was among the units engaged in the five days’ commemoration, which even included a “Ye olde English faire” set up at the Race Club Gardens.

On hand for the occasion with an extra hyphen if needed was Britain’s ambassador to China, Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen. It must have been just after the coronation festivities that the envoy was wounded when his car was machine-gunned by a Japanese fighter aircraft. He narrowly escaped being paralysed, but went on to other postings.

Sir Hughe’s misfortune might have been part of the Japanese bombing of Nankai University on July 29 to shut up the rabble-rousing students. The Japanese followed that up by occupying Tientsin the next day. They still couldn’t evict the Westerners.

On June 14, 1939, the Japanese blockaded the foreign concessions in what history has noted (in passing) as the Tientsin Incident, the latter word a euphemism for Britain’s most ignoble non-military defeat between the world wars.

The British authorities refused to hand over four Chinese, hiding within the British concession, who had assassinated a customs official accused of collaborating with the Japanese.

The British Concession bordered the French to the north, with the Japanese settlement on the far side of that, and to the south the area occupied by the Germans until World War I. The Russians were across the river. All the arriving troops passed through East Station, which neighboured small concessions for the Italians and, previously, the Austro-Hungarians.

While everyone leaving or entering the concession, including women, was publicly strip-searched by Japanese soldiers and food and fuel was blocked, the embarrassed Brits — unable to bring naval thunder in from Europe — bluffed and lied their way to a negotiated resolution. Then, on August 20, they handed over the four Chinese, whose heads were swiftly lopped off.

Just over a week later, Hitler’s tanks rolled into Poland.

It seems to me that, even if Dad had been stationed in Tientsin in August 1937, he must have in some form witnessed the Battle of Shanghai, as it came to be known. I always interpreted Dad’s description of his stay in China as being part of a “police action”, keeping the Chinese and Japanese troops away from one another, not that there was much hope of that. There’s more!

Dad’s War: The Prequel, follows from “Dad was the ‘D’ in D-Day”. Here he’s in China during the Sino-Japanese War of the late 1930s and, by way of warning, some of the photos are pretty grim. This post is split in two parts.

The Lancashire Fusiliers had already been in business for 245 years by the time my father, Wilfred Anthony Dorsey, joined the ranks at the end of March 1933.

As recorded at the Regimental Museum in Bury, they’d been throwing British muscle around since 1688, when they were known as “Peyton’s Own” and went on to do Battle at the Boyne. Regrouped as the 20th Fuseliers, they laid seige to Limerick and captured Athlone, held Gibraltar during the 15 Years War and tackled Bonny Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden, fought in the Seven Years’ War, then on the Plains of Abraham to secure Canada for Britain, and then further south to lose America to the Americans, with General Burgoyne’s 20th Foot captured at Saratoga and imprisoned for five fruitless years.

All of this took place before the 20th’s first recruitment in Lancashire, in 1797, but with the northerners on board, they met Napoleon, victoriously at the Battle of Maida. There followed the 1812 war with America, the Peninsula War, the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny.

On July 1, 1881, the regiment became the 20th Lancashire Fusiliers. The next big fight came in 1898, relieving Khartoum, and that was followed by the Boer War and World War I, with its dreadful Gallipoli fiasco, where the Fusiliers earned “six Victoria Crosses before breakfast”.

The regiment makes a large deal of the fact that JRR Tolkien, the author of “The Lord of the Rings”, served in its ranks, though it could care less that Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the movie trilogy, hails from Burnley, my original hometown in Lancashire. But the main crowing is about James Wolfe and the Duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley), its former commanders, neither one a northerner.

None of these chaps ever served in China either, like my father did.

I am far from the first person to wonder why so little is commonly known about the Chinese episode in British military history, but it’s been suggested that the story is so complicated that retelling it is daunting. Perhaps it’s also too shameful.

The UK Army was in China because of British greed, plain and simple. Colonialism was all about sucking foreign countries dry before they knew what hit them, and inevitably there were backlashes that had to be tamed with the weight of heavy arms.

In the late 19th century the British controlled treaty-yielded “concessions” in Tientsin (now known as Tianjin), Shanghai and Wei Hai Wei. The last was abandoned in 1931, the others in 1940 when the Japanese made their defence too costly. Hong Kong, of course, had its own fabled drama with Britain that dragged on until 1997.

When young men signed up for a stint in the army, most of them were heading someplace a lot warmer than England — the Middle East, India, Africa, Singapore or China.

My father enlisted in the 1st Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers on March 30, 1933, underwent two years’ training at Catterick and Colchester, during part of which time he was evidently in the transport service.

And then, on either November 12 or December 12, 1935, depending on the source, the entire battalion boarded HMT (Hired Military Transport) Dorsetshire at Southampton and sailed off into the Atlantic. The photo of the ship here comes from S/Sgt George Albert Davies’ page at Lancs-Fusiliers.co.uk.

The HMT Dorsetshire, I discover, is not to be confused with the HMS Dorsetshire, which had a hand in sinking the German battleship Bismarck in 1941 and was itself sent to the bottom by Japanese dive bombers off Ceylon the following year.

The steam ship and troop carrier my father was on became a hospital ship during World War II but was still taking British soldiers to the Far East as late as 1953, the year before it was scrapped.

In the course of six weeks Dad and his mates rounded Gibraltar, crossed the Mediterranean and threaded the Suez Canal from Port Said. There were calls at Aden, Colombo, Singapore and Hong Kong before reaching, on January 20, 1936, Shanghai — or as Dad always referred to it, “Shang-guy”. The photo below of the disembarking is from this page on the Fuseliers alumni website.

It would appear from the few records we have that they docked at Shanghai, but other accounts, both British and American, have troops landing elsewhere, on the shore of the Gulf of Chihli (now Zhili) and moving by train inland to Tientsin and Peking. Many Yanks stepped off the boat at Chinwangtao (Qinhuangdao) and had a six-hour, 167-mile journey on the Peking-Mukden Railroad southwest to Tientsin.

But many troops were indeed stationed in Shang-guy. The port city had long had a Shanghai Volunteer Corps, but even by 1932, when the Japanese troops rolled in, it only had 1,500 British, American and French men guarding the foreign settlements. The Japanese shoved, but the volunteers managed to hold them back — until Pearl Harbor changed everything. There’s more!

Today in many places there’ll be people recalling D-Day on the 65th anniversary, and on the other side of the hemisphere from where I am now, in the Canadian town where I spent my youth — Georgetown, Ontario — local dignitaries, some of my old neighbours and perhaps a few World War II veterans are unveiling a plaque.

They’ve selected a spot along the street on which I grew up, Normandy Boulevard, so called because the government built houses there for returning veterans as part of its nationwide Victory Home Project. Normandy was, of course, the region of France where the D-Day landings took place.

My father, Wilfred Anthony Dorsey, returned home from military service well after D-Day, though not to Canada. He was in the British Army and had a go at civilian life in England before deciding the job situation had to be better in Canada. He emigrated in 1953, the year I was born, and bought the house on Normandy Boulevard from its original war-veteran owner. My mother and sister and I followed a few months later.

Dad proceeded, 90% with his own hands, and really only one good arm, to transform the house at #37 into the best on the street — a beautful yard out front and a veranda that later became a roomy enclosed porch, a vast garden out back, a basement excavated beneath, a paved driveway, wood panelling on all the interior walls and carpeting throughout, plumbing, and all the modern appliances as they came on the market.

And he did all this while working for a quarter century, five or six days a week, often 10 hours a day, at a Ford assembly plant that I would discover, in my own brief stint there, was a bit of a hellhole.

But back to the war, the real hellhole.

I’ve always liked to say, based on the few tales Dad shared about his time in the army, that he was chased off the European continent by the Germans in 1940, from the coast at Dunkirk, and came wading back ashore, 270 kilometres to the west, four years later, insisting on staying longer this time.

The hasty exit of the 340,000-strong British Expeditionary Force in late May and early June 1940, gunfire at its heels, was facilitated by Operation Dynamo, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay’s “miracle of deliverance”, as Churchill dubbed it, aboard a makeshift rescue armada of 850 boats, the “little ships of Dunkirk”.

The return trip was Operation Overlord. They came back swatting. There’s more!

Today is the 40th anniversary of the day a famous Christian monk told a Thai audience that Eastern religion might be better. He was dead within hours.

Forty years ago today, a visiting monk from America who has since been described as the most famous Christian monastic since St Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century, died by a quirk of fate in Samut Prakhan.

Thomas Merton, who had formulated theology and theories of peace and justice in discussion and correspondence with the Dalai Lama, DT Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez and many others, had just given a morning talk about melding Eastern and Western religions.

The setting was Sawankaniwas in Tambon Tai Baan, a shady retreat with flower gardens and an aquarium, five kilometres south of downtown Samut Prakhan. It’s owned by the Thai Red Cross Society.

Merton, known as Father Louis, had emerged from 27 years of solitude at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky for two reasons. The first was to meet the Dalai Lama, which he did over the course of three days in Dharamsala, before flying on to Thailand. In earlier correspondence, the Tibetan leader had advised Merton to read about the Vajrayana school of metaphysics, which the American embraced enthusiastically.

In turn, His Holiness would later credit Merton with showing him that Tibetan Buddhism did not have a monopoly on spiritual truth. “As a result of meeting with him,” the Dalai Lama wrote, “my attitude toward Christianity was much changed.” He described Merton as a highly advanced lama.

Merton spent two months in India, also visiting New Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai, in the last city seeing Little Mount and St Thomas Mount, where Indian Christians believe the apostle Thomas brought the gospel in 52 AD, and where he was martyred 20 years later.

Then he had a stopover in Sri Lanka, where he viewed the three reclining Buddhas in Polonnaruwa. “This was,” he wrote in his journal, “the greatest aesthetic experience I’ve ever had in my life. All things become clear.”

Preparing for his journey to the Orient, Merton “was like a kid getting ready to go to the circus”, his secretary at the monastery, Brother Patrick Hart, told Knight Ridder Newspapers in 1998.

“It was a dream come true. He never thought he would get to Asia. He was going with the idea of learning from the wisdom of the East.”

Sawankaniwas, I’m reasonably sure, as seen on Google Earth.

In response to Vatican II, the Catholic Church’s sweeping policy realignment initiated by Pope Paul VI, the Confederation of Benedictine Abbots organised an inaugural Asian East-West Intermonastic Conference in Samut Prakhan. Merton’s second mission was to attend this gathering and, in his talk, compare Marxism to monasticism.

Simply put, the linkage is that Marxists believe change is impossible, and dangerous to attempt, without a thorough understanding of economic sub-structures, while monastics, both Buddhist and Christian, require the same level of understanding of the consciousness. Our inbred prejudices skew our comprehension, always placing our own ego at the centre of things.

It was a year of revolution, 1968, and Merton held forth on Marcuse (”a kind of monastic thinker”), the Sorbonne students (who told him, “We are monks also,” challenging the world’s claims) and Marx’s desire for a progression from individual greed to the good of the community.

Buddhist and Christian monasticism alike, he said, teach that social, political and economic structures cannot be counted on for support because of their inherent vulnerability. Only in detachment and purity of heart can be found freedom and transcendence.

Merton concluded his talk by saying that Buddhism and Hinduism could show Westerners how to achieve that freedom in spite of perceived external limitations.

Any questions for him would await the evening session, so he said simply, “I will disappear from view, and maybe we can all have a coke or something.” It was December 10, 1968, the the 27th anniversary of his entry into the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

Merton returned to the bungalow assigned to him and, around 3pm, had a shower in preparation for a nap. He crossed the floor, still wet, and reached up to switch on a tall floor fan. He was flattened by the current, and the fan fell on top of him, with the power still live. When his body was found soon after, there was a severe electrical burn across his chest. Merton was not quite 54.

It was an accident bizarre enough to generate multiple mystical notions, beginning with the fact that his 1948 autobiography had concluded with the words “to know the Christ of the burnt men”. There’s more!

Once I move to northern Thailand to escape the rising sea that everyone thinks will turn Bangkok into a fantastic scuba-diving site when the ice caps melt, one of the places I definitely want to see is Wiang Kum Kam.

Dovetailing nicely with my interest in Siamese dinosaurs and other prehistoric signs of movement, Wiang Kum Kam was a good-sized town on the edge of what is now the city of Chiang Mai. It was only rediscovered in 1984, and they’ve scraped away enough dirt and come up with enough theories that it’s now a bona fide tourist attraction.

Not that the Night Safari has to worry about the competition. So far there’s nothing at Wiang Kum Kam to make the rubes go golly, and that appraisal isn’t about to change anytime soon.

But for many generations, Wiang Kum Kam was thought to be a mere legend belonging to the dusky past.

And if you bring your imagination along to the scene today, you find yourself in the middle of a fortified, temple-intensive, millennium-old “city” embraced by the two arms of a river that has since taken its affections elsewhere. In fact, the Ping River flooded the inhabitants out 700 years ago, so you have to wonder what freakish karma they’d accumulated.

And the river, having shifted direction well to the west, isn’t done with Wiang Kum Kam yet: it flooded the site three times in 2005.

Situated in a plain ringed by mountains, the settlement was established in the eighth century by Mon migrants from Nakhon Pathom, U-Thong and Lopburi, likely as a trading outpost for the Haripunchai culture they’d sown in nearby Lamphun. The river ensured that it thrived as a key economic centre for centuries, and then it abruptly took everything away.
There’s more!