‘Beyond Murder’ Chapter 7: South Pacific

Three-year-old Roy Sanders took his mother’s death hard in 1899, and friends and neighbors said he had an unhappy childhood. He left home when he was about 14 years old and found work in Indianapolis.

Roy enlisted in the US Navy on April 2, 1917, when he was 20 years old although he claimed he was 21, the age for legal enlistment. The US entered World War I on April 6, 1917. Roy was transferred to the USS Charleston on June 7, 1917.

Charleston was in Philadelphia to help escort the convoy carrying the first troops of the American Expeditionary Force to France. She arrived there on 28 June after passing through submarine infested waters and returned to New York on 19 July. Among the many voyages on which Roy earned his sea legs, Charleston escorted convoys twice to Nova Scotia and made five voyages carrying troops to France and returning with combat veterans.

On August 26, 1919, Roy left Charleston to go to the Naval Training Station in Great Lakes, Illinois, where he was honorably discharged on September 4th as a Fireman First Class.

The 1920 Federal Census lists Roy in Evansville as a patient in the US Marine Hospital, a forerunner of today’s Veterans Hospitals. Odds are good that he had the “Spanish flu,” which killed 675,000 Americans in 1920—the worst pandemic to hit the United States until Covid.

Roy spent the years 1920-1927 out of the navy. Whatever he did during this time wasn’t enough to make him want to stay on land. He reenlisted in December 1927, and in February 1928 he began two years of service on the USS Beaver, which tended submarines in the waters around China and the Philippines.

For about 100 years, starting in 1842, various Western countries forced China’s weak central government to open China to foreign trade in a series of wars and battles. These conflicts were settled by treaties that gave Western countries control of several ports along China’s Yangtze River—the world’s third longest river.

These were known as “treaty ports,” and Western countries’ naval forces guarded them. The Yangtze was important commercially because ocean-bound vessels could go far upstream. The US role in this effort began around 1854 and led to continuous deployment of US Naval forces along the Yangtze and along China’s Pacific coast near the mouth of the river.

Westerners lived and did business together and with China in enclaves called “bunds.” However, the ports and bunds were subject to raids and looting by forces loyal to local warlords.

Roy was part of the US Naval force that guarded the ports and bunds, which was called “the Yangtze Patrol” or “YangPat.” The US built eight gunboats specifically for YangPat. Roy served on three of these, the USS Monocacy, the USS Mindanao, and the USS Luzon.

Chinese cooks, bakers, stewards, and mess attendants worked on the gunboats and wore traditional Chinese civilian attire. Chinese women lived aboard sampans tied to the stern of each gunboat mooring at Shanghai. The sampans would shuttle gunboat crewmembers to and from shore. The women also painted the gunboats and polished the ships’ metal parts.

Roy spent about 10 years in YangPat, and judging by other sailors’ accounts of their YangPat tours, it was the best period of Roy’s life. Many US Navy sailors would remain at postings in China for 10 years or so then retire and continue to live in the country.

Roy was well on the way to being one of those sailors. Some of the Chinese workers aboard Monocacy introduced him to a Chinese woman named Fay, who was 14 years younger than Roy. They fell in love and a missionary married them on November 11, 1930, in Hankow, China, one of the three cities that merged to form the city of Wuhan, where the Covid epidemic began 90 years later.

In about 1939, Ray was transferred to the Philippines and served on the USS Ramapo, a replenisher ship for the US Navy’s East Asian fleet. A US Navy ship brought Fay to the Philippines after Roy arrived there, and the couple had a home in the capital city of Manila.

Ramapo took Roy to San Diego, where he received an honorable discharge on December 10, 1939. He did not reenlist until January 13, 1940. In 1931, he had reenlisted the day after he was discharged. In 1935, he had extended his enlistment for four years. It’s possible that he delayed reenlisting for a month in 1940 because he was thinking of retiring. Or maybe he wanted to take some time in the States before heading back to the Philippines.

During this period, Roy returned to Indiana for a week or more. His brother Jake drove his Model-T to Terre Haute to bring Roy back to Jake and Juanita’s house near Carbon.

Roy made a huge impression on his four-year-old nephew Milton, in part because Roy brought the boy gifts. One was a tank that could be cranked up to drive itself and shoot sparks out of its cannon.

Roy also had a big impact on Juanita, who was smitten with him. He charmed her with stories of the Far East, and she saw in him everything she didn’t see in Jake. Roy seemed equally drawn to Juanita. The two kept up an exchange of letters over the next two years, and Roy sent gifts to Juanita, Milton, and Peggy.

Admiration for Roy was one of the few things Milton and Juanita had in common. When Roy left, Juanita and Jake’s relationship deteriorated sharply.

When Roy reenlisted, the USS Arizona took Roy to the Philippines to serve on the cruiser USS Houston. Japanese aircraft later sunk Arizona at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Next week, Roy’s war.