Rounding a last bend in the river, there appeared our dreamed of liberty port - Shanghai! We passed the mouth of Soochow Creek with its bomb-damaged bridge to starboard, and tied up bow and stern to mooring buoys opposite the famous Bund and the city center. We were not alone. There were a couple of cruisers and a command ship here already - and we were nested with another DD and a DE. These were the ships which we had watched with envy as they passed our mine sweeping operation on the big river. With all secured, there was little to do but wait our turns ashore. And when the time came, we climbed into our whaleboat and made for the fleet boat landing on the Bund. There we were confronted by a huge, bamboo-framed sign facing the river, bearing the words "Welcome Victorious U. S. Seventh Fleet". And were we ever!!

We were treated very well by all - the merchants, the restaurateurs, barkeepers, pedicab peddlers, ricksha pullers, and especially the people on the streets, as on our favorite Bubbling Well Road. One got the idea that our presence was much preferred over whatever preceded it. By the time we said our final farewell to the City in December, we had many new friends to include in our ‘ding hao’s.

There was still work to be done. Ship traffic in and out of town had picked up noticeably, as you might expect. We were next assigned to be the HECV, or harbor entrance control vessel, for the port. As such, we occupied an anchorage in the Yangtze close to the mouth of the Whangpoo River, a place known locally as Woosung. While our official duties included control of the flow of river traffic in and out of Shanghai, our actual involvement is better described as floating post office, movie exchange and pilot stopover. There were always ships anchored nearby, awaiting their turns to enter or leave, exchanging signals with each other, looking for mail or movies or pilots. Ah, the river pilots! Now there was an interesting lot! No ship of any size could traverse the Whangpoo between Shanghai and Woosung without one of these specialists in control. And when they finished delivering a ship to Woosung, they boarded the Robinson to await their next inbound opportunity. Their diversity was notable, their stories spellbinding, their friendliness touching. They were French, and Scotch, and Spanish, and Brazilian, and American, and, yes, Chinese. Some had spent the war in Japanese prisons. All were adventurers of one sort or another, brought together by some magnetic force to this venue and this career. Foc’sle movies excited and fascinated these world-wise pilots as if they were school kids - but that was understandable, considering how they had spent the war years.
 

Some of these pilots, all members of the Shanghai Pilots Association, could recall the old pre-war days, when China’s rivers were prowled by the navies of France, England, Russia, Japan and the U. S. They were known to the old River Rats as "The Forty Thieves", a nickname they had come to in view of the high fees they charged. We only learned of this many years later. One of the old Forty Thieves - Columbus D. Smith - had an interesting USN background. Early in his Navy career, he distinguished himself as an ensign in command of a wooden-hulled subchaser in WW1. Awarded the Navy Cross, he later became a skipper for the Yangtze Rapid Steamship Company for several years, then joined the Forty Thieves. There he befriended another ex-navy Thief - ex-RAdm T. Kikuchi, a Japanese hero of the Russo-Japanese War. T. Kikuchi, in turn, introduced Smith to another ex-admiral, Kichisaburo Nomura, a visitor to Shanghai. Nomura was then a Japanese diplomat, destined to become infamous for his 1941 role in assuring Pres. Roosevelt that the Japanese meant no harm, knowing that the Japanese carriers were underway for Pearl Harbor at that very moment. Smith’s links to the Japanese via the Forty Thieves initially softened his time in Japanese navy prison, but later made no difference to the Japanese Army. 
 

We made one quick side trip in early December - to Tsingtao, 300 miles north on the China coast. Our assignment was to pick up a U.S. general and return him to Shanghai. But when we arrived there, the cupboard was bare. Our ‘fare’ had proceeded to Shanghai by other means. What an expensive ‘no-show’ that was! While refueling, some of us found our way ashore to a local horse race track. We were astonished at the size of the horses - so small their jockeys seemed to be scraping the track with their feet while underway. At the fleet post office, we found no ‘general’ mail, but we did pick up rumblings of concern that Mao Tse-tung and his communist gang would soon sweep over Tsingtao, turning out the lights of freedom so recently turned on. Mao was in the process of forcing Chiang Kai-shek’s army and Kuomintang followers relentlessly southward toward Formosa, their eventual island refuge renamed Taiwan. We left without being able to sample the town’s now-famous Tsingtao Beer, thoughtfully brewed by a local German enclave.