A Communist warship came upon a Royal Naval launch in the Pearl River estuary on September 10, 1953, riddled it with shells and killed six men, wounding five others. A stiff British protest was delivered to Peking without bringing either an apology or compensation. The Nationalists kept up their end of the harassment in that month with one of their warships firing on the British destroyer _St. Bride’s Bay_ off the China coast.
Each of these incidents stirred the British government to send protests to Peking or Taipeh, but they usually elicited only transient interest outside the countries directly involved.
The Chinese Communists’ capture of two American newsmen and an American merchant-marine captain on March 21, 1953, brought the United States government into the long succession of Hong Kong incidents. The reaction was quick and angry, for the Reds had subjected the United States to an unceasing campaign of vilification and had already imprisoned more than thirty American civilians in China. The Dixon-Applegate case came as a kind of climactic tail-twister.
Richard Applegate, National Broadcasting Company correspondent in Hong Kong, and Donald Dixon, International News Service correspondent in Korea, were sailing five miles west of Lantau Island on Applegate’s 42-foot sailboat, the _Kert_, when they were stopped by a Chinese gunboat manned by Chinese soldiers. The newsmen, accompanied by merchant marine Captain Benjamin Krasner, his Chinese fiancée and two Chinese sailors, were in international waters, bound for Macao on a pleasure cruise. Protests that they were violating no law had no effect on the Reds, who accused them of straying into Chinese waters.
The _Kert_ and its six passengers were towed to the Communist base at Lap Sap Mei, transferred to Canton and held prisoners until September 15, 1954. The United States protested vehemently to Peking, and Great Britain joined in demands that the group be set free. Harry J. Anslinger, United States Commissioner of Narcotics, had a private revelation which he duly reported to the United Nations: The _Kert_ had been captured by Chinese narcotics smugglers, led by Lu Wang-tse, a notorious woman pirate! Nothing more was heard of the lady known as Lu—Applegate said after his release that he could not imagine how the preposterous tale had originated, but the Red Chinese let many months pass before they admitted the capture.