Bill Chong Story — page 4
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His first assignment was to find out what had happened to the British consul in Macao, a Portuguese territory near Hong Kong. Macao was officially neutral, but was teeming with Japanese. To make matters worse, the Japanese blanketed the region with patrols.
"I found out if you tried to go there by boat, you'd get shot," he said. "If you walked, you'd get caught. So how the heck was I going to get there?
"I went to a smuggler's town, bandits, crooks, just like you see in the movies. You didn't find a good guy there, all bad guys. I stayed in a little crummy hotel, and I began to get friendly with them."
Small groups of bandits made regular smuggling trips into Macao, which the Japanese overlooked because they brought in a hard metal ore essential in the production of gun barrels.
"The Chinese called it black gold," said Chong. "The bandits would buy it off people for almost nothing. People were starving, they had no jobs, so they'd go every day to the hills and look for this ore. This bandit would organize five or six bandits to carry this ore. Every bandit carried about 20 pounds, with a [hand held] Thompson machine gun."
Chong paid the bandits $2,000 to smuggle him into Macao -- $1,000 up front, $1,000 once he got there. The British consul turned out to be okay, and Chong returned to mainland China.
He wound up spending five years as a spy behind enemy lines. Sometimes he would scout Japanese movements; sometimes he would help shot-down flyers escape back to Allied territory.
"According to some newspapers, I rescued 1,863 people," he said. "That is not true. I never rescued that many people. A few hundred, yes.
"I didn't keep a record. Where would I keep a record? I didn't want to be caught [with papers] saying on this day I brought so many people. Even our head office didn't keep a record, because everybody was busy, nobody had time. I brought them back, put them on the plane, that was my job."
He travelled the countryside by foot, walking 50 to 80 kilometres a day and sleeping on the ground.
"The only time I slept on a bed -- they called it a bed -- was when I slept on wooden planks when I got back to headquarters," he said.
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