China 1949: Year of Revolution by Graham Hutchings

Author:Graham Hutchings [Hutchings, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

A few hours later, the action switched to the stretch of river east of the capital, close to where it suddenly sweeps south and spreads wide to meet the sea. The man at the centre of things here was Sixto Mercado Tiongco, a Filipino-Chinese better known to the communist troops under his command as General Ye Fei. He was in charge of the 10th Group Army, spearhead of the Eastern Assault Group. Just shy of his thirty-fifth birthday, Ye’s task was to get his 28th, 29th and 31st armies across the Yangtze opposite Jiangyin, the fortified strongpoint that guarded one of the few choke points along this section of the river.

This was challenge enough. But during the previous twenty-four hours a new one had emerged in the form of a British warship, HMS Amethyst, a 1,350-ton frigate, rapidly steaming upriver to relieve HMS Consort of guardship duties in Nanjing. Her presence was the cause of a curious interlude, a small one in the context of the struggle for China, but no less telling for that.

A naval vessel from Britain or another country had been stationed at Nanjing on a rotating basis for some time to deliver supplies and provide assurance to the anxious foreign community. Should the need arise, it would assist with evacuation. For reasons that were controversial at the time and never satisfactorily explained since, Amethyst was ordered to sail from Shanghai to Nanjing, a roughly 170-mile journey, on the morning 19 April to take over such duties. Royal Navy commanders seem to have believed that she would reach the capital on 20 April, and that Consort would be back close enough to the safety of Shanghai before expiry of the midnight deadline, after which the communists had said their armies would cross the Yangtze by force unless the government accepted their peace terms.

The ‘Amethyst Incident’ has received much attention in China and elsewhere, and it is the repercussions rather than the details that are of interest here.41 The bare ‘facts’ are that on the morning of 20 April, while steaming upriver towards Zhenjiang, close to where the Grand Canal joins the Yangtze, Amethyst came under fire from communist batteries on the north shore, to which she might have been much closer than was either prudent or admitted by the Royal Navy at the time and for long thereafter.42 She was badly damaged, many of her crew killed and/or seriously injured. She ran aground at what naval charts then called Rose Island.

Subsequent attempts by Consort later the same day, and the cruiser London and frigate Black Swan on 21 April, both of which had sailed up from Shanghai, to rescue Amethyst failed. Several members of the crew of Consort and London were killed or died of their wounds during heavy exchanges with shore batteries. The communists said 252 Chinese lost their lives due to the naval bombardment. An RAF Sunderland flying boat, sent up from Hong Kong, managed to alight on the river and transfer a doctor and

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