Eve of a Hundred Midnights by Bill Lascher Page A

one.”

Chapter 3
THE VOICE OF CHINA
    M el began his journey to Chungking on December 10, 1939. It would be a long trip. First he took a boat to Hong Kong, then a flight from there to the Kuomintang’s capital. During the long voyage, Mel reflected on the complexities of the war in China and beyond.
    His previous visit to China and now these first six weeks back there had helped convince Mel that the world was in the state it was because so many people were unable to look beyond their own situation. He insisted that if people paid more attention to the rest of the world, Hitler wouldn’t have been on the march, Japan would have been kept from expanding into China, and labor disputes wouldn’t be as hostile as they were in the United States. Mel also made it clear that he thought the situation in Asia was even more consequential for the world’s future than the war in Europe.
    â€œJapanese domination can spell only one thing—the East against the West,” he concluded. “And no one can stop this revolutionary shift in Asia besides the United States. I don’t know whether she wants to or should. But anyway it is now her problem. Asia is too close. The Philippines are too important now for us to ignore the Pacific.”
    During Mel’s stopover in Hong Kong he visited Macau andsaw Marie and Carlos Leîtao. “The long line of Marie mothers and sons and daughters accorded me an appropriate welcome. That is I had plenty to eat.” Mel also tried to contact Chan Ka Yik, but he had no response to the letter he had sent to his old roommate’s home in Kwangsi.
    Hong Kong was “full of uniforms,” its harbor mined and blocked by steel netting. Prices were skyrocketing, but the hotels and nightlife were full of wealthy Chinese who “don’t care who wins their war, don’t follow the news.” These people infuriated Mel.
    â€œMakes me believe in purges,” he wrote, but he added that “there are other sides to Hong Kong. Refugee camps, orphans homes, charity affairs to aid the soldiers.”
    The closer Mel got to Chungking, the closer the war seemed. But Mel was ready. He admitted that he missed home and its comforts before he left Hong Kong, but he was still looking forward to the trip. He felt that he would find more people who shared his perspective, and he was impressed by the colony’s resilience after two years of war.
    Finally, sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 one early morning just after Christmas, a China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) DC-3 took off from Hong Kong with Mel aboard. He fell asleep, then woke around eight, just as the plane circled above a thick soup of fog and began its landing. Beneath, obscured by the clouds that always seemed to hang across its hills, lay Chungking.
    In early 1940, Earl Leaf and T. K. Chang, the Chinese consul in Los Angeles, had an intriguing offer for a dentist in a small California beach town called Ventura. Leaf, who was also a former logger, sailor, and journalist, had heard that the dentist Charles E. Stuart was a world-renowned amateur radio “ham.”For nearly thirty years, “Doc Stuart” had been making his name known in amateur radio circles for his ability to contact people in some of the world’s most remote places via shortwave. In this era, achieving clear signals over great distances, especially doing so consistently, still required considerable skill. Stuart’s radio skills would be crucial to China as it tried to generate sympathy and support for its war effort in the United States. So Leaf and Chang asked Stuart to receive propaganda broadcasts sent from China, record them, and retransmit them to a Chinese news service with offices in four U.S. cities.
    In a little room off the side of his dental office in downtown Ventura, Stuart and his dental assistant (and soon-to-be wife), Alacia Held, set up a miniature studio with radio receivers, headphones, a teletype