Frank Sutton M.C. won the battle of the Great Wall of China

Posted in Adventure, Famous battles, Historical articles, History, War on Wednesday, 4 April 2012

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This edited article about Frank Sutton originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 682 published on 8 February 1975.

Chinese civil war, picture, image, illustration

Sutton’s men saw fierce fighting in the battle with the rebels which raged along the ancient Great Wall of China, by Andrew Howat

The one-armed English soldier, General Frank Sutton, M.C., and his Chinese garrison had been under siege for more than a week. They were trapped in their arsenal – a marble building set in the middle of a large lily pond – as shells and shrapnel tore holes in the roof and the walls.

Outside the arsenal some 30,000 Chinese troops kept up the bombardment in the hope of forcing the ‘English War Lord’ to surrender. For a while General Sutton had difficulty in persuading his 250 soldiers not to throw down their weapons. But the arsenal also contained a mint, and he gave his men boxes of silver to keep on fighting.

Then, on the eighth day of the siege, two messengers carrying a white flag were rowed out to the arsenal. They asked Sutton to accompany them to their headquarters in a nearby village, where an armistice could be arranged. Their offer seemed genuine, and Sutton agreed to go. He took with him a native interpreter and, in case there was trouble, his Service revolver.

On the way to the village Sutton wondered just what the armistice terms would be. He was a stranger in a land split in two by a fierce Civil War. He had sold his services as a munitions expert to the Peking Government in the north, and here he was captured by rebel forces supporting the south! The best he could hope for was that the rebel commander, General Ma Jui, would allow him to leave China unharmed.

So, wearing an old drill shirt and a pair of soccer shorts, Sutton was escorted into the house which served as Ma Jui’s headquarters. The General was seated at a table guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. As he entered the room Sutton heard a murmur come from the assembled staff officers. His interpreter looked at him fearfully and whispered, “They are saying we will be murdered by the men with bayonets.”

Sutton thought quickly. If he could create a diversion there was just a chance that he might be able to escape from the house. “Tell the General,” he said to the interpreter, “that it is not courteous to receive an honourable opponent with fixed bayonets, and ask him to order his men to stack arms.”

The interpreter passed his request on. The soldiers stacked their arms together on the floor, and for a moment it looked as though Sutton could dash safely from the room. Then Ma Jui sprang to life, He grabbed a revolver which was lying on his desk, and “for one horrid fraction of a second” Sutton found himself looking down the barrel.

“There was a spurt of flame, almost in my eyes – and a bullet cracked by my ear,” Sutton said later. Sutton’s hand flashed to his holster, and as Ma Jui prepared to fire again, the Englishman “let drive at him from the hip, plumb into his stomach. He sagged, flopped down and his head hit the table. He was dead.”

After that pandemonium raged. The soldiers retrieved their rifles and the interpreter was shot dead. The staff officers closed in on Sutton, but he shot his way out of the room, and seconds later was running from the village, through the rice-fields, back towards the damaged arsenal. When he reached the building he loaded a box of silver on to a motorboat, and set off up-river to the city of Shenyang, where he hoped to contact the powerful Manchurian War Lord, Chang Tso Lin.

General Sutton had first come to China in the early 1920s, at the time of the Civil War. A professional adventurer, and a hero of the First World War, he possessed ‘a smattering of knowledge about railway construction, chemistry, mechanics, and general civil engineering,’ and had ‘a keen interest in bombs’. He had made enough money in the gold-fields of Western Siberia to enable him to retire comfortably to England. But he thought that, “It is not good for a man under forty to settle down.”

He lost his fortune of £20,000 in a series of unsuccessful investments in Shanghai, and went to China to help the Government cause, in which he believed, and also to try to recoup some of his money.

He was given the staggering salary of £2,000 a month to take charge of the arsenal, and was soon turning out thousands of shells and guns. He drew his money from the mint, and this enviable situation only came to an end when, five months later, the siege began.

After his narrow escape at the ‘armistice talks’ he would have been justified in quitting the country. But his fighting spirit was up, and when he finally located Marshal Chang Tso Lin, he promised to provide him with ‘the best guns in Asia’. He was installed in another arsenal (much less beautiful than the first), and a few weeks later his newly-manufactured gun was ready to be tested.

The tests were ‘a triumph’, and the only snag was the question of payment. The Marshal considered that ‘One-Arm’ Sutton wanted too much money. He said that a Chinese munitions expert had offered him an equally good but cheaper gun. Sutton then challenged his rival to “fight a duel at a thousand yards range with our respective guns”. But the Chinese, fearing defeat, did not accept.

During the following months Sutton continued to make guns and ammunition for the North Chinese. He had to contend with two more rivals: one who tried to bribe his workers away from him, and another who attempted to shoot him while he was in his house. To foil the sniper Sutton had his windows blacked-out, and only then could he eat his meals in comparative safety!

His guns proved a great success. Sutton’s deeds were widely discussed, and the London newspapers ran stories querying the identity of the mysterious one-armed Englishman who was Marshal Chang’s Munitions Minister. Then, when speculation was at its height, Sutton was asked to take command of Chang’s army, and to lead it against 40,000 rebel troops who were massed behind the Great Wall of China.

It had so far proved impossible to defeat the troops, as the ancient wall – which in places was 25 ft. high, and 25 ft. broad – provided them with an impregnable defence. But Sutton did not consider the task beyond him. “I moved against them,” he said later, “With some thousands of fairly well-trained men and a good show of guns, including mortars, as I intended to mine, break, blow up, or scale the wall somehow. Luckily, there was no need to damage it seriously.

He discovered that the top of the Wall ‘bristled with troops and machine-guns’, which he cleared by raking the area with shrapnel. He then saw that ‘plenty of bombs’ were lobbed over the wall. When that was done he ordered a frontal attack.

“We clambered up by stones and rocks,” he recalled, “got on top and saw the main body of troops in a hectic state of panic on the other side. Machine-guns and light field guns soon got them on the run, and an enfilading fire of big three hundred-pound bombs put the whole lot in utter confusion. The Battle of the Great Wall was won.”

When Marshal Chang heard of the victory he hailed it as a major military achievement. The experienced Sutton, however, did not think so highly of it. “I cannot pretend that it was a particularly thrilling or glorious affair,” he said modestly.

Even so, he was promoted to the Chinese rank of Major-General, and was awarded £20,000 by the delighted War Lord. After this excitement the Englishman returned to the more prosaic task of making munitions. Southern spies tried repeatedly to assassinate him with bombs and revolvers, and this finally decided Sutton to return home. “The humour of being shot at begins to pall after the thirteenth bullet has parted your hair,” he said wryly.

And so, in the summer of 1927, General Frank Sutton set sail for Canada and then England, rejoicing at the prospect of peace and quiet. Like Lawrence of Arabia he had become a legend by fighting in a strange country, with strange allies, for a cause that he had made his own.

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