This page ought to be of more interest to folks who have a more general interest in how US Navy sailors lived and worked in the Far East in the 1920s.
The street is labeled Cherry Brandisky Ave, Tsingtao, China, according to Abner "a place of wine, women and song." Googling for "Cherry Brandisky" today comes up blank. The bar where the sailors are enjoying their beers is unknown. One aspect of these photos which is striking is how often sailors are portrayed drinking beer, a pleasure which was illegal at the time back in the US. Also, I have noticed the beers look pretty dark, supporting beer expert Michael Jackson's contention that the popularity of the watery yellow lager which most Americans associate with the term "beer" is actually a post-Prohibition phenomenon.
This series of photos indicates that one form of recreation for Navy sailors was camping on Luzon in the Philippine Islands.
Here are a couple of unidentified cruisers at sea. Well, I'm pretty sure the ship at the top is a cruiser, but I am guessing about the lower photo.
This is the USS O-10 (SS-71) at an unknown pier. According to my reading, the O-10 spent most of her career as a training ship and never ventured into the Pacific Ocean, so technically this photo is not related to the Asiatic Fleet. Perhaps Abner trained on her.
The US Navy shared Chinese waters with a number of European powers, principally the United Kingdom. This is a snap of the British cruiser HMS Vindictive at Tsingtao.
The filename for this photo suggests it is of a YMCA building in Honolulu, but in fact I have no reason to believe it was in Hawaii. I don't even know whether my grandfather ever visited Hawaii. It's possible this building could have been in Manila.
This photo would be far more interesting if I had any idea where it was taken, and who these soldiers are. I assumed they were local authorities in one of the treaty ports, but the character just visible above the door looks like it could be Japanese katakana.
A note on the back of this photo prompted me to look up the history of the USS HENDERSON, the Navy's first dedicated Marines transport. In February of 1927, she was at Quantico, VA, loading Marines for the defense of the international community at Shanghai, then threatened by the revolutionary Nationalist Kuomintang. She and her Marines arrived in Shanghai around May, and she stayed there for six months in a supporting role. Accounts of the HENDERSON's activities in the Far East don't say much about what happened after that, but from notes on the back of this photo I can determine that in the early spring of 1928 she was in Hongkong. On 2 April 1928 she set sail for San Francisco, arriving on 4 May. My grandfather was aboard, and he snapped this photo of rough seas. After three years in the Asiatic Fleet, he was going home. A month after arriving in San Francisco he was discharged from the US Navy.
Continue on to Commercial prints.
