"Dreamland" -- A Different Fifties

This is an utterly amazing work. More people should read and comment on it!

Thanks. I put a lot of research and writing effort into this back when I was originally banging away at it.

I do hope to get some feedback on both the "hard history" questions and the issues that made me abandon it before, namely the balance among the story elements (plot, action, theme, character, dialogue). Is there not enough present-tense action? Too much talking? Too much ruminating on "philosophical" questions? Too much description of scenes? Does the plot move too slowly? Is it interesting enough to hold attention?
 
CHAPTER NINE (continued ...)

Ming Guo had been up for hours. He’d arrived on Weichou Island from Beihai the night before, and Comrade Liu had briefed him on the plan over a late supper of cold rice and fish. He would go out before dawn on a fishing boat that belonged to a friend. The boat would take him to Haikou, the port city on the northern coast of the biggest island on the Chinese coast, Hainan. There were still many communists operating in the steep hills in the center of the island.

He had been engaged in one of his regular assignments, carrying dispatches from Chairman Mao’s much larger base in Shaansi to the Hainan soviet, when he’d been contacted to detour to Beihai and wait for further instructions. He’d spent a pleasant couple of days there, staying at the house of a party member who worked in the city’s police department, enjoying the local seafood and relaxing until the package had come. It had been a bag containing a camera and a very long lens. With it were instructions on how to use the camera and contact information for Liu.

Liu was a clerk who worked for the French priests and nuns on Weichou. He had been a communist since the days of Deng Hsiao Ping’s uprising near Nanning in 1929. Over dinner, he’d told Ming Guo that a big ship full of Americans had been anchored on the far side of Hsieyang Island for two weeks. Liu had learned about it from the fishermen who sailed out of Weichou every day. The American ship was on the south side of the smaller island, at a spot not visible from Weichou. Liu had sent a message to the Hainan soviet when he’d heard that the ship had neither moved nor signaled for help for many days.

The boat that Liu had arranged for Ming Guo to go out on belonged to another party member, Wong, a grizzled old Hakka fisherman. He hadn’t said more than ten words to Ming Guo since he’d come aboard. Wong’s boat would fish in the waters to the south of Hsieyang and then, instead of returning home, go on to Haikou the next night. Ming Guo had found a good spot on the piled up nets and gone back to sleep when the boat sailed. Two hours later, Wong had awakened him to get at the nets, and he’d begun to assemble his camera.

Now he was watching as the big ship moved away from the island. Ming Guo had grown up in the mountains of Jejiang province, well inland from Shanghai. He didn’t like boats or being on the water, and he didn’t understand anything about them. None of what he was seeing made sense to him. It appeared the Americans had expended a great deal of effort to build some kind of dock for the island, and that they had put a lot of equipment there. But the place was basically a ball of rock in the middle of the ocean. The crazy foreigners had left a fortune in brand new building material there, and now they were leaving. If this was to be some kind of depot, the location proved how crazy the Americans were. The place was far from any industry, and very far away from the fighting with the Japanese. If they needed some kind of place to retreat to if the Japanese made a major push to the south, this little rock would be useless.

“Hey, Old Wong! Is the big ship turning?” He pointed toward the island.

“Huh?” Wong turned and shaded his eyes with his hand. He peered out at the ship for a moment, then turned to Ming Guo. “It’s turning.” With that, he went back to work playing his nets out.

Ming Guo grinned. The Hakka weren’t Han Chinese – not “real” Chinese to most people. There were many stories about them: They had come south running from the Mongols, they were criminals chased out of the cultured cities in the north, they were Mongols themselves. Whatever the truth, little bands of them lived in isolated communities in the south, usually in the hills on the worst land, or in small fishing villages. Probably half the people who lived on Weichou were Hakka. The French Catholic missionaries from Vietnam had been very successful with them and most of the Hakka on Weichou were Catholics. Liu had told him that Wong had no trouble being both a good Catholic and a good communist, but that Ming Guo shouldn’t expect him to say much; according to Liu, Wong was notoriously suspicious of Han Chinese people. This suited Ming Guo fine. The less the old fisherman talked to anyone, the better.

Ming Guo tilted his head down again. He had the big camera lens propped on the boat’s low gunwale as he lay nestled comfortably on a coil of rope. He peered through the view finder, his finger resting gently on the shutter. He’d already shot ten pictures. He had fourteen left, the instructions with the camera had said.

The ship had turned so that it was now parallel to them, and only the highest point of the island was visible beyond it. Suddenly that knuckle of rock disappeared in a cloud of smoke as great chunks of stone erupted upward. Ming Guo involuntarily jammed his finger down onto the shutter and immediately wound the film with his thumb. “Ma da!” Ming Guo cursed. By the time he tripped the shutter again, the eruption was growing down the length of the island, as more rock rose up from behind the ship.

Ming Guo saw a wave, small but distinct, rushing out away from the island toward them. The big ship rocked a little when the wave passed swiftly beneath it. Before he could look up from the camera, the wave had reached their boat. At that moment a great thundering crack sounded. Ming Guo turned to see Wong whipping around to face the direction of the sound, a look of complete astonishment on his face. For a moment, Ming Guo had the thought that this may be a volcano, an exploding mountain he’d read about in the party school back in Shaansi.

The boat rocked gently and Wong turned to look, wide-eyed, at Ming Guo. Ming Guo shrugged and shook his head to signal that he didn’t know what was happening. Then he turned and looked through the camera again. A huge cloud of smoke was spreading out from the island, more on its southern than its northern side, and big chunks of rock were raining down all around. As he snapped more pictures, he saw geysers in the water as some of these impacted between the ship and the island. Over the next minute or so the cloud of dust began to settle as it spread out, almost obscuring his sight of the ship as it did.

“Should we go?” Wong asked, his voice unsteady. He was crouching down next to Ming Guo.

“No, not yet.” Ming Guo had no idea if they were in any danger. He was more afraid that the Americans might send one of the small boats he’d seen out to investigate them. They were almost a mile away from the island and, as large as the explosion had been, they had not really been threatened by it.

“What was it?”

“Comrade, I have no idea.”

“Was it a bomb?”

“There’s nothing there worth blowing up, is there?” Ming Guo asked.

Wong snorted. “Nothing. There used to be some people living there, a long time ago. Some poor fishermen. There hasn’t been anyone there for many years. We just fish around the reef there sometimes. That’s all. It’s just a piece of rock in the ocean.”

“Well, let’s watch a while and see what happens.” Ming Guo looked back through the long lens and saw the ship turning again, and heading back to the dock.
 
CHAPTER TEN​

New Casualty Figures Highlight Continuing Losses in China
The New York Times
June 20, 1952

The War Department released casualty figures in China for the first three months of the year last week. Forty-three Americans were acknowledged to have died in combat-related action. A growing chorus of questions about the U.S. involvement in China, and last Fall's so-called "surge strategy," both in and out of the government, has caused the Senate Armed Services Committee to table yet again it's discussion of the upcoming appropriations bill. Asked whether the inability of the Committee to agree on a budget resolution with the House defense appropriations proposal would result in yet another move to pass an emergency military funding bill, Senate Majority Leader Wherry (R-NE) refused to comment as of press time. Meanwhile, yet another protest led by mothers of soldiers and airmen killed in China took place yesterday on the Capitol's steps.


- - - - - - - - - - - -​

The three Boxcars flew in a V formation heading northwest as they dropped beneath the thin layer of cirrus clouds. As soon as they had reached their cruising altitude, two hours before, Stone had let Gerry sit in the copilot’s seat. Gerry could look back and just barely see the big plane on their right. The intense greens of the Szechuan plain stretched out before him. Every bit of the land below had been sculpted by the hand of man: patterns of small fields bordered by windbreaks and irrigation ditches and canals covered the whole surface of the earth, sunlight glinted off of fish ponds and the wider waterways, and little villages connected by narrow dirt roads and walkways were evenly spaced throughout the flat landscape. They were flying slightly below ten thousand feet, and Gerry could just make out the tiny shapes of carts and the occasional old truck or car on the wider roadways.

It had been a month since what came to be known in their little world as “The Big Blast.” Since then, Gerry had divided his time between the construction work on Sunlight Island and the SCEC office in Beihai, shuttling between the two places in one of the service boats that had come with the Pacific Maiden.

Brown & Root’s blasting technicians had known what they were doing: despite how it had appeared from the ship, almost all of the tons of debris thrown up by the huge explosion had fallen just where they’d intended, mainly down-slope toward the northern part of the island. Although they’d been covered with grit, the dock, the crane and the fleet of earth-moving machines had escaped any serious damage. Three weeks after the Big Blast, Sunlight Island had a serviceable air strip. At the end of the month the first planes capable of flying on their own across the Pacific had begun to arrive. Jack Stone had piloted one of these, which had included three of the big C-119 Flying Boxcars. At the end of the month, the first of the three ships that would bring all of the rest of the Longbow material had pulled up to the island’s dock.

Once Stone had arrived, Gerry’s management duties on the island had begun to lighten, and he focused more on the cover operations in Beihai. Before he had left, Li had helped Gerry rent a small suite of offices in the newest part of the town. Now the SCEC office was officially “open.” There he had met Brian Skinner. Skinner had been a Flying Tigers crew chief who had become passably fluent in Mandarin over his years in China. He had been recruited by OSS a few years before. Skinner had been the agent who had found Li to help get the SCEC cover set up. He was a bald, round man who wore old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses and seemed to have graduated from the same school that had produced his own taciturn trainer back at Dreamland. Stone had told Gerry that Skinner was not “in” on Longbow at all. According to Stone, Skinner was quite used to the compartmentalized nature of the work he did for OSS in China, and wouldn’t ask uncomfortable questions.

Li had also helped to find SCEC an office assistant, a middle aged local woman, Liang Mei Jin. Mrs. Liang, a widow, had been educated at a missionary school in Nanning. Her husband had died years ago, and her children were grown. She was a tiny woman, dressed every day in a prim black dress. She was quite bilingual in English and wrote swiftly in Chinese in a neat, square hand.

Gerry had reviewed with them the oil exploration forms that Li and Gerry had developed during the long period when they had been working to get Commissioner Wang to agree to the sale of Sunlight Island. Mrs. Liang was set about the tedious task of making copies of these forms. This was going to be a laborious process of hand-writing, as there were very few Chinese typewriters in Beihai and none were for sale. Gerry had ordered one from a company in Hong Kong, but these complex machines were very expensive and quite rare. It would be many months before they might hope to have one. One of the printing shops in Beihai could have printed the forms, but the cover story of requiring secrecy for the company’s oil exploration activities was inconsistent with the idea of letting the typesetters know what they were up to, so Mrs. Liu’s gnarled fingers would work at slowly and painfully creating these legal documents. Gerry thought about the effort that would be involved – days and days of writing completely useless documents, all for the sake of a lie. He shook his head at the human cost. At least Mrs. Liu would be paid well for her work, something that was a rarity here in this coastal town far from the great commercial centers of south China.

Stone laughed and called out: “You can almost smell the food from up here, huh?”

Gerry forced the image of Mrs. Liang’s painstaking work from his mind. He laughed at Stone’s comment and nodded. Stone had told him that he had taken a river boat up to Szechuan on leave when he’d been in China before. He was a Massachusetts yankee, and the extreme spicy heat of the local food had apparently not agreed with him. Gerry had been to Szechuan twice with his father before he’d gone to America, and he had loved the food. “It’s a Texas thing,” he’d told Stone.

They were flying to Chengtu to meet another of the Longbow “senior conspirators,” the legendary founder of the Flying Tigers, Claire Chennault. It was also the first of the many Longbow ferry flights. Crates of support equipment were stuffed into the big cargo bays of the three planes. These would be stored at what they hoped was a secure set of hangars at the western-most Flying Tigers base, just outside of Chengtu. An additional reason for this early flight was to begin getting the people below used to seeing increased air traffic along this route. It was likely that many of the people on the ground beneath their path had seen an airplane for the first time in their lives today.

“So, tell me more about Chennault. What’s he like?” Gerry asked after they had flown for a few more minutes. The two other crewmen had gone back to the big cargo area to check on the plane’s load.

“He’s a real character, that’s for sure,” Stone said, pitching his voice just above the sound of the engines and the air passing over the greenhouse-like cockpit glass. “Chennault’s really maybe the greatest airman alive, I think. The guy is as natural a flyer as I’ve ever known.” Stone turned his head back and surveyed the sky around them.

“Let’s see, what can I tell you …?” he went on, “he’s a Louisiana boy, a real coon ass. He’s been flying since the Great War. Back in the ‘30s he taught at the Air Corps Tactical School. A lot of people don’t know it because he doesn’t seem like the bookish type, but he really did write the book on fighter tactics.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s like anything else, I guess: something new comes along, like airplanes, and it takes a while to actually figure out how to use them. For fighters, it was Chennault, it really was. It seems obvious now, but back in the early days, people really didn’t understand how to use fighters against bombers.”

“Really?” Gerry had a hard time imagining that a simple idea like intercepting bombers on the way to their targets had somehow been a big insight.

“Really. It’s like the pieces are all separate at first, I guess. It takes someone pretty damned smart sometimes to see how they fit together; even if it’s real obvious once it gets figured out. So obvious that now they can’t remember when they didn’t see how they were supposed to fit together.”

Stone’s eyes passed over the instruments in front of him, scanning back and forth out of long habit. Gerry noticed he also checked over his shoulder to make sure they were still alone on the flight deck. “Anyway, he’s a real son of a bitch. Frankly, I think he’s kind of crazy. He doesn’t get along well with many people. That’s what got him here. I guess he’s like me, he just couldn’t be a regular Army guy.” Stone flashed Gerry a big grin.

“But he does get along with Peanut … err, I mean Chiang. And he’s totally sweet on Madame Chiang. She’s got him wrapped around her little finger, as far as I can tell.” Gerry nodded; Chennault wasn’t the only one who had fallen under her spell. Chiang’s wife, Soong Mei Ling, had been educated in the United States and was one of the Generalissimo’s main assets when it came to diplomacy with America. Gerry knew quite a bit about her because she was one of the missionaries’ great success stories. She was the daughter of a Hakka Christian who had made a fortune selling Bibles in China. She had spent part of her youth in Georgia before graduating from Wellesley College. It seemed most Americans found her Southern accent, her Christian faith and her deep knowledge of their country irresistible. As China’s First Lady, she – and other members of her large family – were fixtures in Washington and high society on the east coast. When Chiang had appeared on the cover of Time magazine while Gerry was in law school, it had occurred to him that Soong Mei Ling was the perfect person to promote China’s interests using the Chinese notion of gwanhsi – influential personal relationships – in connection with America’s own vanity about itself.

“If Chennault’s the southerner you say he is, I can see that happening,” Gerry said.

“Oh yeah,” Stone laughed and pulled a cigar from the pocket of his shirt. He chewed on it as he went on. “You should see it. She steers him like the old man flies an airplane. She’s got every one of his buttons and levers figured out.” Stone engaged the autopilot while he lit his cigar. As the flight deck began to reek from the thick blue smoke, he said, “Here’s what I think. I think she read Gone With The Wind. And I think she’s recast the movie. She’s Scarlett, and Chennault’s Rhett.”

“Uhm, Jack, wouldn’t that make Chiang Ashley?”

Stone chuckled. “Shit, you’re right. Well, that part doesn’t fit.” They flew on for a while, the sounds of the plane’s passage through the sky filling the pause. “But I think Chennault’s broken the spell a little now, anyway. He got married a couple of years ago to a Chinese girl half his age, a real sweet gal. She was a reporter from Shanghai who did a story on him and ended up marrying him. I kind of envy him. They seem real happy.”

Gerry looked below. Szechuan literally means “four rivers” and they were passing over one of those rivers now. The broad waterway wound through the intricate patchwork of thousands of fields.

“Hey, we need to change course up ahead. Feel up to it?” Stone smiled broadly behind his dark sunglasses and worked the cigar in his mouth. Despite his previous resistance, he’d been letting Gerry do more and more flying.

“Sure!” Gerry grinned and reached forward for the yoke on his side of the flight deck.

“OK now, easy does it. We need to come left about ten degrees, to two-eighty-two.” Stone reached forward and switched off the autopilot. “Let’s see if you can work the throttles to keep our altitude and speed level this time.

“Right.” Gerry reached down and put his left hand on the throttle levers.

“OK – do it now.” Stone put his headset on and keyed his mike. “Heading to two-eighty-two.”

Gerry held his breath as he banked the big plane gently to the left and pushed slightly on the left rudder pedal, his eyes darting back and forth between the compass, the airspeed gauge and the artificial horizon. Gerry felt the nose began to fall slightly as the turn began. He pulled back gently on the yoke and, at the same time pushed the two big throttle levers forward. The horizon began to sweep to the right before him and he felt an exquisite flush of pleasure as the airplane answered to his commands. Just before the compass rolled to the new heading he began to reverse the inputs he’d made into the controls. There was only the slightest rocking as he corrected the roll to put the plane on a level line with the world outside the big cockpit windows. The airspeed needle had barely moved.

“Allright!” Stone called out. “Excellent! You’ll be doing barrel rolls in this thing before we’re done.”

“Thanks, Jack,” Gerry said, feeling his face flush with pride. Through the haze of humidity and smoke ahead he saw a line of hills. Chengtu lay just on the other side of those hills. The city sat in its own valley, a smaller mirror of the big flat-bottomed bowl that was Szechuan. And beyond that valley were the foothills of the Himalayas.
 
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