NHF Flix Issue #1: The Sand Pebbles

“I was home...what the hell happened?�

Table of Contents 1 China Revolution, Vietnam Evolution 2 A China Sailor 2 “Hello engine...”

5 Visual Guide Map 6 “This Ain’t the Chinese Navy” 7 Powder Keg: Wanhsien 8 Imperial Parasites 10 Settling Sand What is NHF Flix?

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China Revolution, Vietnam Evolution Armed H-1 Iroquois Helicopters give air support to U.S. Army troops of the Second Brigade, Ninth Infantry participating in Operation Cordia-Six in the Long Tau River Area. (U.S. Navy Photo)

By the mid-1960s, the tiny regional conflict in Southeast Asia that President Lyndon B. Johnson felt was “not worth discussing” soon ballooned into a highly complex and complicated proxy war. Johnson was too busy initiating domestic reforms back in the states than to directly deal with hot conflict thousands of miles away. Regardless, U.S. forces in Vietnam grew exponentially after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

President Johnson and his military advisors began a plan of retaliation using the United States’ superior air power capabilities. The following year, the U.S. Navy began its first strategic bombing campaign in Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder, with the U.S. Air Force and Republic of Vietnam Air Force. By 1966, capitulation of the North Vietnamese seemed unlikely. The conflict was aggressive, costly, and well publicized back home.

Celebrated movie director Robert Wise released his sweeping period epic The Sand Pebbles to theaters in the final days of 1966. It was the film he had wanted to make for many years, but could not due to difficulties in financing and the extensive time it took to scout locations in Asia. The film he made in between projects, 1965’s The Sound of Music, would become his greatest commercial success, earning just over $286 million in the box office. Although The Sand Pebbles did not reach the critical and commercial success of The Sound of Music, it did fairly well in the box office, raking in nearly $30 million during its run in theaters.

There were other films released about the military in 1966, none of which approached the scale and magnetism of Wise’s four-year pet project. The most notable release that year was Disney’s lighthearted comedy Lt. Robin Crusoe USN, starring Dick Van Dyke. Yet The Sand Pebbles was far from comedy – as far away as the setting it depicted. It’s subject matter and portrayal of the United States Navy in revolutionary 1920s China was both serious and intense. Some viewed it timely to

the current international affairs occuring in the mid1960s.

When The Sand Pebbles released in theaters, many moviegoers and critics could not divorce what was going on in the film to the ongoing war in Vietnam. Historian Larry Suid stated in his book Sailing the Silver Screen that The Sand Pebbles “probably said more about the current war in Southeast Asia than the period it ostensibly portrays.” The most scathing contemporary review of the film came from long-time New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther. “It is likely that audience seeing the film [. . .] will not see it simply as a tale of the involvement of a United States Navy gunboat on the Yangtze River in China in 1926,” he said bluntly in the opening sentence of his 21 December 1966 review. He went on to call the film “characteristically exotic and confused,” and “a curiously turgid and uneven attempt to generate a war romance.”

Many consider Crowther’s critical stance on the film’s allusions to the war as canon. Crowther specifically called it, in his own words, a “weird sort of hint of what has happened and is happening in Vietnam.” The film began principal photography in November 1965, only a year after the USS Maddox incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Surely the production team had a chance to include some imagery to the film, as it’s timing within the scope of events in Southeast Asia seem to the historical eye as a well-placed motion picture footnote:

“They are saying [. . .] that the use of American forces to protect our interests and our nationals in a foreign land, especially one in political turmoil, is a fruitless and ironic enterprise.”

Other appraisals were equally as critical as Crowther’s New York Times review. The LIFE magazine review of the film felt it to be both too long and too boring.

The reviewer felt that it’s complex storyline and setting told the casual moviegoer “more than you could possibly wish to know about life on a U.S. gunboat patrolling the upper reaches of the Yangtze River during the 1920s.” The review did not mention the ongoing Vietnam War, but did question the film’s Jekyll and Hyde-like attitude of McQueen and the other sailors towards the locals. “It has a way of haunting the corners of your mind,” the reviewed ended, “as historical footnotes are sometimes wont to do.” Regardless of any personal or political stake in the making of it, The Sand Pebbles is an important document of the setting it portrayed and the time period when it was released.

A China Sailor

The Sand Pebbles is partly based on the life experiences of Richard McKenna, author of the 1962 novel of the same name. Richard Milton McKenna enlisted in the United States Navy in 1931, several years after the Chinese Nationalist revolution of the late 1920s.

After spending time as a hospital corpsman on the West Coast, McKenna began his education of Asia on the transport ship USS Chaumont (AP 5), which brought troops into the Far East. His early inspiration for the novel and subsequent film came from his time as a fireman aboard USS Gold Star (AK 12), where he worked as an apprentice in the engine rooms to earn the rating of machinist mate.

McKenna’s firsthand experience as a “river rat” along the Yangtze came during a two-year stint beginning in 1939 aboard the gunboat USS Luzon (PG 47), one of eight gunboats built by the U.S. Navy in Shanghai for service along the river. Luzon frequently patrolled the waters between Shanghai and Hankow, one of three cities now forming modern-day Wuhan. He did not spend time soaking in the sites and sounds of China on the brink of chaos against Japan. Like the character of Jake Holman, McKenna wanted to know everything about engines, devoting all of his spare time to understanding the ins and outs of his ship’s power plant. Author and naval affairs expert Robert Shenk eloquently explained this fascination in the 1984 introduction to the book:

Author Richard McKenna (TheSandPebbles.com)

bles won the 1963 Harper Prize Novel the following year.

His literary love letter to his time in the Asiastic proved to be his final opus. McKenna died from a heart attack two years later in 1964.

One can surmise the film and novel’s main character Jake Holman (played by Steve McQueen) is loosely based on the author. Both the character and author were born to humble surroundings in the west. McKenna grew up in the small town of Mountain Home, Idaho in the early twentieth century. The character of Jake Holman was born in fictional Wellco, Nevada, although he continuously mused throughout the film that home was “whatever ship I’m on.” That sentiment becomes one of the central themes in The Sand Pebbles, and serves as a major plot device in the final words spoken in the film.

“Hello, Engine…”

The Sand Pebbles is the story of a lone ship amidst the revolutionary fervor of mid-1920s China. In reality, Holman and the rest of the crew known as “the sand

“It can be said that he remained more interested pebbles” aboard the gunboat San Pablo would not act so

in the engines than in political events and spent singular in their motives or movements, moving away

most of his working life below decks. It was the from the last stand movie trope often seen in war and action films. By the 1920s, the United States had been

drama of the engineroom that fascinated the patrolling the Asiatic for over seventy years. Ships of the

sailor, and moreover, he was intent on making Navy frequently patrolled the Yangtze on missions to rate.” protect American property and interests in an effort to McKenna retired with the rank of Chief Petty Officer in “show the flag” to the other colonial powers in the area.

By 1922, a separate command was made for the 1953 after serving in both World War II and the Korean Yangtze patrol, redesignated as ComYangPat. At the War. He took his love for the written word into his new career as an author. After graduating from the University time of the Nationalist Revolution, Rear Admiral Henry Hughes Hough, a stern and calculated intelligence of North Carolina shortly after the Korean War, McKenna settled in as a writer, publishing a series of science officer, commanded ComYangPat. Western powers like fiction short stories for newspapers and magazines until Italy, Japan, Britain, and the United States were all eager he finally finished The Sand Pebbles in 1962. The Sand Peb- to carve their piece of the Imperialist pie. Each nation

Sailors in Hankow, 1928 (NHHC Photo Archives)

frequently patrolled the same areas and cities (known as “Treaty Ports”) along the Yangtze as the United States.

Their duties often included protecting businessmen and missionaries, as seen throughout the film. Indeed, foreign powers owned many concessions in Chinese cities along the waterways without domestic oversight due to the late 19th century Open Door Policy, or what the Chinese would come to call the “unequal treaties.”

The most notable areas of foreign concentration were in Shanghai and Hankow, where The Sand Pebbles takes place. These establishments included social clubs and, most importantly, bars and brothels.

Filmmakers in the Taiwanese cities of Tam Sui and Taipei painstakingly recreated the film’s setting of revolutionary China. Additional locations were filmed in Hong Kong and California, with many interior sets shot at a sound studio in Fox’s studio in Burbank. Director Wise wanted to clearly depict a nation on the brink of rebellion at the end of the Chinese warlord era. This is where the film begins. The title scene opens to the bustling city of Shanghai, complete with Chinese junks and sampans littering the jammed waterways. The words that first appear on screen in the film frame the story:

China, 1926…

Ravaged from within by corrupt warlords…oppressed from without by the great world powers who had beaten China to her knees a century before…

China…a country of factions trying to united to become a nation… through revolution…

Audiences soon get their first glimpse of the main protagonist of the story, Jake Holman. Holman, a career sailor, is a brash and opinionated loner who can only find solace and reason with engines, not individuals. To him, everything has a system and a place in the movement of the ship, and Holman finds the machinery altogether comforting. That is, until he is brought into the reality of life aboard San Pablo with her crew.

McQueen’s portrayal of Holman varies differently from McKenna’s treatment of him, at least initially.

He is clearly not as quiet and simple as the character portrayed in McKenna’s novel. His disrespect for authority, however, is spot on. When told to head straight to his next duty assignment aboard San Pablo, McQueen instead saunters straight to a nearby bar called “The Crow’s Nest” he had frequented before to drink whiskey and take a prostitute. The romantic entanglement between Holman and Shirley Eckert is also more fleshed out in the film than the novel. Perhaps Wise felt that audiences would appeal to Holman’s relationship with Eckert, played by then nineteen-year-old actress Candice Bergen. Indeed, his encounter with the China Light teacher and missionary is established within the first few minutes of the film, long before he ever sets foot on the gunboat. Most reviewers of the film later chided the relationship as a clumsy and unnecessary story arc.

In a scene where Holman has dinner with several members of the China Light Mission, including Ms. Eckert, we begin to see his character evolve. He warned Eckert of the dangers of being involved with him from he outset. As he famously stated in the film, “nice girls don’t talk to China sailors.” Several individuals at the dinner table, including China Light Missionary leader Mr. Jameson, feels the gunboats are a symbol of American imperialism and a threat to Nationalist Chinese interests. Jameson shows true ill will towards the sailors of the Yangtze Patrol, stating that he “trusts God rather than guns.” Another man seated at the table called the

gunboats “a joke,” with San Pablo being the worst of the lot.

Holman shrugs off the slander of his next duty station. His trip upriver would be his first, which excited him. Holman felt that the gunboats were not a joke, but rather a means “to make a show [. . .] something for the officers.” Indeed, one of the central themes of both the novel and film is his intense distrust of authority figures, - Jake Holman namely naval officers.

To him, the men sitting at the dinner table in Shanghai were just officers in different clothes. His duty aboard San Pablo would be nonetheless ideal, as he requested working with a small ship where he could remain secluded with the engine. His time previously spent in the waters outside of China Station was fruitless and uneventful. But there were engines – and San Pablo had those. To Holman, home is the ship he was on.

No officer or higher authority could take that away from him, so long as he was actively serving in the U.S. Navy.

He would make the best of it.

In reality, sailors actively sought after duty on China station and Yangtze patrol during the first half of the twentieth century. Although the possibility of conflict with warlords, Chinese Nationalists, Communists, and Imperial Japanese was always a possibility, many considered the exotic ports of China like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Hankow a better alternative to shore stations or patrolling European waters. This was especially the case during punctuated times of war. According to Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley, author of Yangtze Patrol: The U.S. Navy in China, service along the Yangtze was

“Nice girls don’t talk to China sailors.”

Holman inspects the engine (Fox Studios)

“avidly sought after by the sad little squad of civilian bachelors too blind, feeble or deaf to be in the European trenches.” One historian said that Americans in China were “above the law,” and enjoyed the readily available “hedonistic pleasures” in the many port cities along the Yangtze. Another article originally published in the Military History Journal elaborated more on the benefits of being a China river rat. Given his personal distrust of authority, you can get a sense immediately why Holman would want to serve in such homogenous surroundings:

“The gunboats enjoyed an informality blue-

ocean navy officers would not have tolerated.

Typically, no one wore insignia. Beards were

common. Men of all ranks wore the same uni

form - white shorts and white shirt. The only

way to tell if a man was an officer was to look at

his shoes: Officers wore white, sailors wore black.”

After transporting aboard a steamer upriver to Hankow with the China Light missionaries, Jake Holman finally reaches San Pablo in the dead of night. In the film, San Pablo represented a relic captured from the Spanish Navy during the Spanish-American War.

The production team for The Sand Pebbles built a replica 1920s-era gunboat for the film. San Pablo is modeled after USS Villalobos (PG 42), a 150-foot steel hulled gunboat used for the Yangtze Patrol between 1903 and 1928. Like the fictional San Pablo, Villalobos was captured by the U.S. Army in 1898 and rechristened as a U.S. Navy vessel. The production spent $250,000 building the ship in Hong Kong with a modified draft so it could traverse the Tam Sui and Keelung Rivers in Taiwan where they filmed. According to Wise, construction would have approached $1 million had she been made

USS San Pablo (right) was constructed to resemble the Yangtze River gunboatUSS Villalobos (left)

in the United States. The crew size for the Villalobos topped out at fifty-seven, which appears greatly reduced in the film. Like Villalobos, San Pablo was slow and drew too much water to travel many places up the river, which put her in dangerous situations when traveling into central China. Filming in China’s interior proved impossible.

After a quick introduction with watch stander Frenchie Burgoyne, Holman retreats to his sanctuary, the engine room. Because of the close-quartered nature of engine rooms, a mock up of San Pablo’s engineering facilities was reconstructed in Burbank, California, complete with a more modern 1000 HP Vickers Co. engine. For the first time in the film, we see Holman in his element. He looks and touches everything with care, even speaking to the engine as if to become familiar on a personal level. Unlike the perception of being an old ship that burns far too much coal for its own good, everything inside is clean and polished. Ships like the Villalobos and fictional San Pablo were powered by a 450ihp vertical triple-expansion engine, which came to live courtesy of two double furnace Scotch boilers.

Such machinery made gunboats of its kind move at top speeds approaching eleven knots (13 mph).

“This Ain’t the Chinese Navy”

Jake Holman realizes quickly that he will not work the engines in solitude as requested. Like many gunboats operating along the Yangtze during the 1920s, San Pablo had a crew of Chinese workers, or “coolies,” to do much of the hard work and heavy lifting onboard.

This made life for enlisted crew much easier. The unofficial crew worked for less than a dollar a day and was paid by taking “a squeeze from Uncle Sam,” which the “sand pebbles” felt would not make much difference in the long run. For the short term, work for sailors

was light and the food plentiful. Their time onboard was spent drilling for the inevitability of combat, which their commanding officer Lieutenant Collins (played by Richard Crenna) felt was a daily necessity. These daily drills drew much amusement to the local Chinese. In one moment while performing a “repel boarders” drill early in the film, Chinese bystanders laugh and mock the sailors as if it were a theater production, much to the disdain of Holman.

The other sailors respect San Pablo’s coolies - not for their place on board, but for their own personal benefit. Each coolie had a specific task on the ship, which they called their “rice bowl;” essentially their ticket for pay, meals, and boarding in the less-than-savory former enlisted quarters. One cannot watch this simple explanation of social and military hierarchy without drawing a direct parallel to the experience of African American sailors in the United States Navy during the era of Jim Crow.

It is this kind of disruption in structure that Holman does not gel with. When the ship finally gets underway to steam upriver and “show the flag,” Holman began a series of arguments with Chen, the ship’s “bilge coolie.” Each sailor knows their place, including the unofficial Chinese workers – all except San Pablo’s newest addition. Holman was specifically trained to work the engines, not to lounge around and get fat off Chinese cooking. He screamed defiantly at Chen that the vessel “ain’t the Chinese Navy,” after a particularly nasty altercation in the engine room, which drew a sense of general unease amongst the crew.

The main tension in the film comes between Lieutenant Collins and Holman, which began following the first engine room incident with Chen. Under this backdrop of revolutionary China, a separate and personal battle waged between Holman’s reason and distrust

of authority and Collins’ overwhelming sense of duty.

Both are stubborn and set in their ways, for better or worse. When Chen is accidently killed after one of the keys in the engine’s jacking gear came loose, Collins chastises Holman heartily for the loss. “We have to refit ourselves into the design of San Pablo,” Collins barked to Holman immediately following the accident. Despite Holman’s insistence that the death would have been his own had Chen not insisted on fixing it himself, he is ultimately seen as a pariah to the rest of the crew.

Holman’s unease with the engine room coolies slowly decreases as the film goes on. He is equally uneasy when his only friend onboard, Frenchie, begins a relationship with Maily, a prostitute (called a “hostess”) at a local brothel called the Red Candle in the port city of Changsha, where the ship and crew are located for most of the film. The brothel in The Sand Pebbles closely resembled a China sailors’ frequent in Ichang (present day Yichang) called Cockeye’s Bar and Restaurant. According to Rear Admiral’s study of the Yangtze Patrol, Cockeye’s “was a dead ringer” for the establishment featured in the movie. “One could partake of dubious culinary and liquid delights while engaging in romantic badinage” at the establishment, “with such of the local debutantes as found Cockeye’s to be a profitable and trysting place.”

Holman’s crewmate Stawski, better known as “ski” (played by actor Simon Oakland), treats the Chinese with contempt, including the women. Frenchie is sweet and gentle to Maily, and the two soon begin a relationship. He used his own money (with the help of Holman) to buy her freedom from the brothel. The two are soon married, albeit illegally under the eyes of the law. Under the backdrop of what’s to come, even the casual observer knows that they are doomed. Frenchie later dies due to pneumonia for swimming ashore to see Maily after San Pablo is blockaded in the winter months near Changsha. Maily is killed by Nationalist forces.

Powder Keg: Wanhsien Although he stated that “slopeheads” could use some teaching of their own, Holman begins instructing Chen’s replacement Po-Han on everything he knew about engines. Holman even uses Po-Han as leverage in a fight against crewmember Stawski later in the film, using analogies of his instruction (fists were “hammers”) to help the feeble Po-Han to defeat his lumbering and overpowering foe. Everything comes back to the order of the engine.

The breaking of cultural barriers between crewmembers and hired coolies are halted with the first signs of aggression with the Chinese and foreign navies. In response to an altercation with British warships firing on unarmed civilians along Wanhsien, San Pablo sailors are routed out of Changsha with pitchforks and torches.

Although the angry mob call the American sailors as “foreign devils” and “murderers,” the crew is ordered

by Lieutenant Collins to not fire back in order

“One could partake of dubious culinary and liquid delights while engaging in romantic badinage with such of the local debutantes as found Cockeye’s to be a profitable and trysting place.”

- RADM Kemp Tolley Yangtze Patrol to avoid an international incident. Safely on board, Collins received an urgent telegram explaining the event that sparked the local Chinese to act with hostile intent:

“Last night on the Wanhsien, up the gorges of the Yangtze, two British warships fought it out with the local warlord. Two hundred Chinese were killed, and one-hundred-and-fifty British.

The Bolsheviks are now saying that two thousand innocent Chinese were slaughtered.

We’re up against a new strategy of lies.”

The San Pablo then became the first U.S. force to come into contact with what would become Chiang Kai Shek’s takeover during the Northern Expedition. Their orders were to treat the incident at Wanhsien and the hostilities that followed as an “authentic civil war.” In real life, smaller gunboats like Villalobos and Monocacy (PG 20) and the Clemson-class destroyers USS Paul Jones (DD 230) and USS Stewart (DD 224) had been monitoring the pattern of local incidents closely from the river since 1924. With an anti-British and anti-Japanese boycott already full underway, it was only a matter of time before a similar sentiment swung towards American ships. The powder keg was lit.

This incident spoken of by Lieutenant Collins is likely modeled after a similar true-life story of the 1926 “Wanhsien Incident,” or “Battle of Wanhsien.” Sand Pebbles author McKenna went to great lengths to study the history of Sino-British and Sino-American relations during the time period, so it is plausible that the event mentioned in both the book and film are linked.

Angry Chinese after the Wanhsien incident upriver (Fox Pictures)

The beginning of the Nationalist revolt (Fox Pictures) The 1926 Wanshien Incident between the British Navy and local Chinese warlords began in the late summer of 1926. General Yang Shen, a local warlord headquartered in the treaty port of Wanhsien, needed the abundance of vessels on the river to move his troops towards the north where fighting was ongoing between competing factions. He also needed money to feed and supply his army. As a result, he instigated a “wharfage tax” on all nearby vessels of foreign countries. Unlike the French and Japanese warships operating along the Yangtze, British ships refused to carry troops on their vessels or pay the tax.

On one particular incident at the end of August, a group of Chinese troops boarded the SS Wanhsien and demanded passage up north, which the ship’s captain refused to do. The event was later diffused when a boarding party from nearby HMS Cockchafer arrived aboard to prompt the Chinese to leave.

Angered by these events, Yang Shen eventually managed to capture SS Wanhsien and her sister ship, SS Wantung, complete with the full compliment of British officers and native crews onboard. After a heated negotiation between the British Consul and Yang aboard HMS Widgeon, the British chose instead to use forcible measures. The British seized SS Kia Wo at Ichang on 4 September and armed it with naval personnel and weapons, ready to take General Yang Shen and his troops head on. They arrived the next day and sailed alongside Wanhsien, quickly boarded her. There, the boarding party of sailors engaged in vicious hand-to-hand combat with the Chinese, which “ended in more British deaths than were saved.” Meanwhile, nearby British warships Cockchafer and Widgeon shelled Yang’s assembled forces on shore. Eventually, British forces withdrew from the fight against Yang, with the remainder of captives and their two ships returned back to British possession. As a result of the conflict, nearly one thousand Chinese civilians and soldiers died, mostly from the shelling of

the port city by HMS Cockchafer and HMS Widgeon.

Imperial Parasites

Prompted by the action at Wanhsien, Collins and San Pablo are ordered to evacuate American interests in central China, including the China Light Mission. Once there, Jameson and Eckert refuse to leave the mission.

They showed great disdain for the sailors sent to rescue them, even when the romantic relationship between Eckert and Holman began to blossom, despite the established apprehension of Holman. Tensions mount in the following scenes as the crew of San Pablo is faced with a series of clashes against Nationalists, including the death of Po-Han at the hand of Holman himself, who shoots him out of mercy against Collins’ orders. Holman is chastised and called a “Jonah” for this, and is immediately recommended for transfer off San Pablo.

The whirlwind of events throughout China makes Holman’s transfer impossible. China is too far swept up in revolutionary fervor. San Pablo, acting alone, is needed to either help restore order or protect Americans located deep inside the country. By the time the ship reaches its next port, they are greeted with signs that read “Go Home” and “Under the direction of the citizens of the Republic of China.” Every Americans along the Yangtze were now lived with a target on their backs. The revolution had begun.

Tensions with the Chinese soon drew to a fever pitch. With the river running low in the final months of 1926, San Pablo is forced to winter in a state of blockade amidst a flurry of Chinese sampans. Throughout that winter, those in nearby Changsha call the crew foreign devils and “imperial parasites.” Food is thrown in disgust at them when they travel under armed escort to the American consul in town. This is a dramatic role reversal for the same men that acted so cavalier when their Chinese crew, by then departed, did their work for

them. Crewmembers are forced to sloppily run the ship in positions they are now unaccustomed to without the aid of the coolies. The ship falls into disrepair and the men soon appear disheveled and worn by their labors.

Imprisoned in Changsha with little options and fewer instructions, Lieutenant Collins, a man sworn by duty to avoid conflict, must “pray for an early spring, or permission to open fire.”

Once word has arrived that Chiang Kai-Shek has taken Nanking, Collins is forced to uncharacteristically act outside his orders and steam to China Light to rescue the missionaries, with or without their acceptance. “If the San Pablo dies,” he said, “she dies clean.”

Thus began the most exciting action of the film, which culminated in an epic confrontation between the crew of San Pablo and a boom blockade of junks and bamboo along the Chien River. The American battle flag is raised just before the fighting commenced. Many of San Pablo’s sailors stare at it in awe and fascination as if they are reintroduced to it, only then remembering what they are fighting for and whom they represent. Such inspiration proved beneficial in the he subsequent action against the Nationalist forces. The fighting at the boom is intense, causing heavy casualties on both sides.

The final scenes at the China Light Mission upriver in Paoshan are admittedly difficult to watch. Much like The Bridges at Toko-Ri, the final moments of The Sand Pebbles are both gut wrenching and cautionary in nature.

Some historians and film critics argued that the ending to the film was a blatant anti-war message. Both were adapted from novels, albeit written nearly a decade apart.

Unlike his scathing review of The Sand Pebbles, Crowther praised The Bridges at Toko-Ri as “one of the best modern war pictures” he had seen.

In the resulting confrontation between the missionaries and approaching Chinese, both Collins and Holman are killed in the melee. They in effect become martyrs to their cause, which has been open for wide interpretation ever since its release. Holman’s last words are spoken in the film bring back the theme of an engine’s order and function, as if it were some cruel refrain to some deistic lullaby. After being shot by the approaching Chinese, Holman shouts, “I was home [. . .] what the hell happened!”

Holman dies propped up against a power plant unused by the missionaries, its symbolism and context unmistakable. To Holman, “home” referred to the safety and security of San Pablo. It is a fitting parallel to something the character mentions in the very beginning of the film.

Film critics like Crowther could not resist casting off the final scene as analogous to Vietnam:

Just before the death of Jake Holman at China Light Mission. Holman lives and dies by the “engine” principle.

(Fox Pictures)

“In the ire and resentment of his crewmen as they have to take on the task of fetching Amer ican citizens out of the bristling hinterland, we feel the tightening muscles and the quivering nerves of American men in Vietnam.”

San Pablo engine now on display at the SS Lane Victory, San Pedro, CA (SS Lane Victory)

Settling Sand

The four-year film project was a critical success for director Robert Wise and commercial success for Twentieth Century Fox. Wise would later comment that The Sand Pebbles was the most difficult and challenging film he had ever worked on. For his role of Jake Holman, Steve McQueen earned his only Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In all, The Sand Pebbles was nominated for eight Oscars and eight Golden Globe Awards. The film’s only major win came for Richard Attenborough’s role as Frenchie Burgoyne, earning him a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.

An American construction firm contracted to build bridges in South Vietnam bought San Pablo after production of the film ended. She eventually changed hands again, surfacing years later in Indonesia as the “Nola D” of the Seiscom Delta Exploration Company. According to the unofficial fan site of the film, the “Nola D” was sent to Singapore in 1975 for scrap. The engine for the ship used to film in Burbank also changed hands over the years. Today, the 1000 HP engine is now a permanent fixture aboard the liberty ship museum SS Lane Victory in San Pedro, California.

Nearly fifty years after its release, The Sand Pebbles continues to shine as one of the best films of its time period. Brilliantly shot and wonderfully acted, its

story of a man brought to the edge by his devotion to duty and the moral dilemma between right and wrong is a remarkable edition to the annals of film and naval history.

Source Material: Crowther, Bosley. “‘The Sand Pebbles’ Begins Its Run at Rivoli:Picture Offers Lesson on Foreign Ventures.” The New York Times, December 21, 1966.

McKenna, Richard. The Sand Pebbles. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984.

Schickel, Richard. ‘The Sand Pebbles.” LIFE Magazine, January 6, 1967.

Smith, Steven Trent. “Welcome to China!.” Quarterly Journal of Military History 25, no. 4 (Summer 2013), 80.

Suid, Larry. Sailing the Silver Screen: Hollywood and the U.S. Navy. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996.

Tolley, Kemp. Yangtze Patrol: The U.S. Navy in China. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1971.

Websites: The Sand Pebbles, www.thesandpebbles.com SS Lane Victory, www.sslanevictory.com