Zugsmith, Leane "Shangai to Manila"

A disheartening, profoundly sad story of Frenchmen serving aboard a Vichy French passenger ship (the fictitious LUTETIA) in the Far East in late 1941. The ship, once a popular vessel in the Marseilles-Yokohama trade, is now nearly deserted by passengers as she sails from Shanghai to Manila and then on to Saigon. And, it turns out, she is also steadily losing her crew for, at each Manila call, more and more desert to join the Free French of General de Gaulle (there’s a recruiting office in town). The French are presented as thoroughly demoralized by their loss to Germany and humiliated by Vichy’s recent (July 1941) turning over of Indochina to the Japanese. The crux of Zugsmith’s short story involves the ship’s purser and bar steward, both of whom are toying with the idea of joining the French, and at story’s end, both do desert the LUTETIA for de Gaulle’s forces. In an unintended irony, the author includes an American character, a used-car salesman traveling from Shanghai to Manila, who feels the pervasive fear aboard the Vichy-controlled ship and can’t wait to disembark in Manila. “I’m not easily scared,” he says, “and I’ll tell you what. Manila isn’t the first place I want to be. Only I’m damned glad to get off in Manila tomorrow.” The irony of course is that this story was published less than a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – and less than six weeks before the fall of Manila itself to Japanese troops.