At 0700 hours, two hours before the convoy was to get underway, a meeting was held in the motor pool office, a small wooden building at the entrance to the motor pool. The motor pool itself was a barbed-wire-fenced enclosure within the First Battalion compound.

Present were Lieutenant John Macklin, who would again be the officer in charge of the convoy; Sergeant Zimmerman; Corporal McCoy; and the eight other enlisted men of the convoy detail. They had just spread maps out on the dispatcher's table when they were joined by Captain Edward Banning.

The usual route the convoy traveled could not be followed on this trip, because of the necessity to stop at the six Christian Missionary Alliance missions. The first deviation would be to Nanking. Normally they turned off the Shanghai-Nanking highway onto a dirt road just past Wuhsi. Fifty miles down that road was the ferry across the Yangtze River between Chiangyin and Chen-chiang.

It would now be necessary to enter Nanking, drop off supplies for the Christian Missionary Alliance there, and pick up the Reverend Feller's wife, her luggage, and their household goods. It was a hundred miles from where they normally turned off, a two-hundred-mile round trip, because it still made good sense to cross the Yangtze between Chiangyin and Chen-chiang.

"It has been suggested, sir," Lieutenant Macklin said to Captain Banning, "that at the turnoff point for Chiangyin we detach from the convoy one of the Studebaker automobiles, the wrecker, and the missionary truck with the Nanking supplies. The rest of the convoy would go onto Chiangyin and wait for the others to return from Nanking there. That would mean spending the night in Nanking."

There was no question in Sergeant Ernst Zimmerman's mind who had made the suggestion, and he was not at all surprised when Captain Banning said, "That seems to make more sense than having the whole convoy make the round trip." Banning continued, "Why don't you have McCoy drive the civilian car? That would make sort of a Marine detachment, with the wrecker, to accompany the missionary vehicles."

"Aye, aye, sir," Lieutenant Macklin said.

There was therefore, Sergeant Ernie Zimmerman concluded, some reason for McCoy to go to Nanking, as there was obviously some reason why McCoy had been given the convoy as kind of a primary duty. He had not been told what that reason was, and he had no intention of asking. If they wanted him to know, they would have told him. He believed the key to a successful career in the Corps was to do what you were told to do as well as you could and ask no questions. And to keep your eyes open so that you noticed strange little things, like the fact the regimental S-2 paid a lot of attention to a truck convoy that was really none of an intelligence officer's business, and that the real man in charge of the convoys was not whichever officer happened to be sent along, but Corporal "Killer" McCoy.

It took about an hour to decide-and mark on the three maps they would take with them-where the convoy would leave their normal route to visit the other five missions where they would be stopping.

Then Lieutenant Macklin sent the enlisted men to the arms room to draw their weapons. Each Marine drew a Colt Model 1911A1.45 ACP pistol with three charged magazines. Two PFCs drew Browning Automatic Rifles, caliber.30-06, together with five charged twenty-round magazines. Sergeant Zimmerman and Corporal McCoy drew Thompson submachine guns, caliber.45 ACP with two fifty-round drum magazines. Everybody else took their assigned Springfield Model 1903 rifles from the arms room. There was also a prepacked ammo load, sealed cases of ammunition for all the weapons, plus a sealed case of fragmentation grenades.

There never had been any trouble on the Peking convoys. Sergeant Zimmerman, unaware that he was in complete agreement with the colonel, believed this was because the convoy detail was heavily armed.

There were nine vehicles in the convoy when it rolled out of the First Battalion compound: four Marine Corps Studebaker ton-and-a-half trucks, with canvas roofs suspended over the beds on wooden bows; two Christian Missionary Alliance trucks, also Studebakers, differing from the Marine trucks only in that they did not have a steel protective grill mounted to the frame; two gray Studebaker "Captain" sedans, with the Christian Missionary Alliance insignia (a burning cross) and a legend in Chinese ideograms painted on their doors; and bringing up the rear was the homemade pickup/wrecker, stacked high with spare tires and wheels.

Sergeant Zimmerman drove the wrecker. He usually rode in it as a passenger, but its normal driver was at the wheel of one of the missionary trucks. The second missionary truck was driven by a Marine who ordinarily would have been assistant driver on one of the trucks. Lieutenant Macklin drove one of the missionary Studebakers, and Corporal McCoy the other.

As the trucks made their way through heavy traffic toward the Nanking Highway, the passenger cars left the convoy and went to the Hotel Metropole to pick up the missionaries. Zimmerman was not surprised when they had to wait by the side of the Nanking Highway for more than an hour for the missionaries. Missionaries were fucking civilians, and fucking civilians were always late.

The first hundred miles went quickly. The Japanese Army kept the Nanking Highway and the rail line that ran parallel to it in good shape. Every twenty miles or so, near intersections, there were Japanese checkpoints, two or three soldiers under a corporal. But they just waved the convoy through. Long lines of Chinese, however, were backed up at every checkpoint.

It was less a search for contraband, McCoy thought, than a reminder of Japanese authority.

Just past Wuhsi, two and a half hours into the journey, the convoy rolled through another Japanese checkpoint, then turned off the highway onto a gravel road which led, fifty miles away, to the ferry between Chiangyin and Chen-chiang.

Once they had reached the ferry, the Reverend Feller, Mr. Sessions, and Mrs. Moore got in the back seat of the Studebaker McCoy was driving, and (trailed by one of the missionary trucks) headed down the highway for Nanking.

The rest of the convoy, led by Lieutenant Macklin in the other missionary Studebaker, started off toward Chiangyin. It was the rainy season, and, predictably, it began to rain buckets. The road turned slick and treacherous, and it took them nearly as long to make that fifty miles as it had to come from Shanghai to Wuhsi.

(Three)

Christian Missionary Alliance Mission

Nanking, China

1630 Hours 14 May 1941

Nanking was a curious mixture of East and West, ancient and modern. The tallest building in the city, for instance, was not a modern skyscraper but the Porcelain Tower, an octagon of white glazed bricks 260 feet tall, built five hundred years before by the Emperor Yung Lo to memorialize the virtues of his mother.

Recently, from 1928 until 1937, Nanking had been the capital of the Republic of China. But in 1937 the Japanese had captured it in a vicious battle followed by bloody carnage. Their victory was soon known as "The Rape of Nanking."

There had nevertheless still been time for Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government to make their modern mark on it. Outside of town was the Sun Yat-sen mausoleum, honoring the founder of the Chinese Republic. And within the city half a dozen large, Western-style office buildings were built on wide avenues to house governmental ministries. There was also a modern railroad station and a large airport.

After "The Rape of Nanking," in the correct belief that representatives of the foreign press (whom they could not bar from China) would all immediately head for Nanking, the Japanese had made a point of keeping Nanking peaceful. Only a handful of military units were stationed there, and they were on their good behavior. When, in the interests of furthering the Greater Japanese Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere it became necessary to slice off some heads, the persons designated were first removed from Nanking.