Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1927
It is interesting to comment further on the political situation. In those days we foreign nationals paid no attention whatever to the Chinese laws. As I have already stated, France and England still held concessions in Shanghai. Germany had lost hers when she lost World War I. The American policy had turned away from foreign concessions and as a goodwill gesture we were in the process of turning over our portion of the city to China. But at the same time the Japanese were doing just the opposite. Day by day they were entrenching themselves deeper into the former German and American sectors. The Hongkew section of the city was already being called the Japanese Concession in 1927 and they were rapidly taking over the businesses of the American sector which ran for five miles down river along Yangtsze Poo Road and approximately one mile inland from the river. The other side of the river, Pootung, behind the wharves was solidly Chinese and a mass of rabbit warren type buildings for as far as you could see. I have never stepped foot over there except for the Standard Oil compound. To compare conditions then with now is most difficult. As I write, May, 1974, the five marines who were symbolically guarding the American Embassy in Peking have just been asked to leave China because they have been seen jogging in the park with the words "U. S. Marines" written across the front of their sweatshirts.
To get back to my guard duty. I was always assigned to roving patrols in the areas where service men congregated, namely dance halls, barrooms etc. and I was expected to help the fellows keep out of trouble whenever possible. We didn't care what they did as long as it didn't involve stealing, fighting or hurting people or anything that was likely to give the service a bad name. When the curfew hour came I always managed to be in a dance hall so I would take off my belt and leggings and join the merrymaking until five in the morning when people could leave the buildings and go home. We of the patrol squads if we tired of one place could always put our duty badges back on and move wherever we liked as though we were on some official duty. For the first few weeks the main streets had barbed-wire entanglements down their centers and there were sandbag machine gun forts at principle intersections. That looked pretty grim but one soon forgot about it when you were inside. The traffic police in the British section were big powerful looking Sikhs from India. They did an excellent job and best of all they seemed to like Americans and came to our aid whenever we needed it. The wives of these Sikhs although they weren't bad looking were notable for the fact that they always seemed to wear big yellow men's shoes. They must have had big feet for women. As time went by and no violent action occurred the curfew was relaxed an hour more at a time until there was none at all, but still I stayed on as special policeman for as long as we were in Shanghai. I traveled all over the city day and night and never again will I expect to see anything as interesting as the International City of Shanghai at the end of the era of Western control in China. No one book could do justice to it as it was in those days.
About June 10th conditions in North China became so dangerous for foreign nationals due to roving bands of Chinese army units that the Marblehead was sent to the Gulf of Chihli (Po Hai) and we found ourselves based at a place called Chinwangtao near where the Great Wall comes down to the sea. When we came to anchor all we could see about a mile away was a rock jetty with a railroad track on it where the British had a station for loading ships with coal from mines somewhere inland from this point. About a half mile back from the beach we could see a little Chinese village all one-story buildings composed of grey cinder block, rough timber and plaited reed. Even they seemed to be plastered with grey mud and it was about as basic as anything I had seen so far. In some of the dwellings the family pigs roamed in and out the same as the children and chickens were often tied by one leg to a string attached to the door frame. When we went ashore on liberty there were no paved roads and no rickshaws but there were donkeys.