Publisher's Synopsis
Japan had occupied eastern China by early 1938. Shanghai was surrounded and westerners who lived and worked in "sin city" via treaties from the opium war were advised to leave. However most "Shanghailanders" had too much both personally and financially at stake to evacuate. Some even came the other way. Robert Gregg, his wife Gwendoline, and their sons Godfrey and Dwight returned from home leave to find Japanese soldiers (and several horses) living in their house on the outskirts of Shanghai. As Chief engineer of Standard Oil for China, Mr. Gregg also found that the Japanese had destroyed much of the company's infrastructure as "collateral damage" of the conflict with the Chinese. The company's demands of him over the next two years ensured that the same forces that were tearing Shanghai apart would do the same to his family. Meanwhile, in Nazi-controlled Vienna, American and British intelligence recruited a brilliant young physician of Jewish background named Arthur Peretz. He sailed to Shanghai under cover of the Diaspora of the Anschluss, took over a ward in the Shanghai General Hospital as a "German" doctor, and married Gwendoline, who had divorced Robert Gregg. War finally came. Having left for California to study at Berkeley, Godfrey was shipboard in the middle of the Pacific when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Japanese occupied Shanghai early that morning. Robert Gregg had to prevent them from using fuel stored by Standard Oil, and Arthur Peretz had to find a way to send intelligence on ship and troop movements to Free China. He found it in a radio built by his young stepson (and delivered weekly at great risk) to a British radioman from the HMS Peterel named Jim Cuming whoremained at large throughout the war. Dwight Gregg Peretz tells his triumphant story, what it was to be Born in the Lap of the Dragon.
