The End for Bill Wallace in Communist China
On the Day December 19 1950
Khen Lim
Bill Wallace (standing, centre) with the staff of Stout Memorial Hospital, Wuchow, China, 1946 (Image source: Baptist Press)
Bill Wallace’s tragic death at the hands of the Communist
Chinese is not just an injustice. It was amoral because the Communist killed
someone who served and loved the Chinese people. Unlike how some might see it, his
death was all but a waste.
Bill did suffer in the final weeks of his life
but even so, he cared more about his co-workers and their hospital than his own
life. When he was first arrested, he said, “Go on back and take care of the
hospital. I am ready to give my life if necessary.”
Born William Lindsay ‘Bill’ Wallace to parents William
and Elizabeth Wallace on January 19 1908, he often followed his father, a
physician, on his patient rounds although his heart was not into medicine but
more on mechanical things including automobiles and motorbikes.
At 17 years of
age, young Bill was labouring over a car in the family garage when he heard God’s
call to him to be a medical missionary. In obeying the Lord’s command, he
promptly recorded his commitment at the back page of his New Testament Bible and
never looked back.
“When I was trying to decide what I’d do with my life, I became
convinced God wanted me to be a medical missionary. That decision took me to
China,” Bill said.
Bill Wallace (Image source: Baptist Press)
Little did he realise that in acquiescing to God’s request on
July 5 1925, he had also answered the prayers of Christians led by Dr Robert
Beddoe who had been feverishly calling on the Lord for a missionary doctor to
serve at the Stout Memorial Hospital in Wuchow (now Wuzhou), China.
His quest
began with medical school and then a surgical residency tenure at the Knoxville
General Hospital in Knoxville, Tennessee. Just as Beddoe wrote to the Southern
Baptist Foreign Mission Board (FMB), pleading, “O God, give us a surgeon,” Bill
wrote his letter also to the FMB, saying:
“Since my senior year in high school, I have felt God would
have me to be a medical missionary, and to that end I have been preparing
myself. I attended the University of Tennessee for my premedical work and
received the M.D. from the University Medical School in Memphis. I am not sure
what you desire by way of information but I am single, twenty-six years old and
I am a member of the Broadway Baptist Church.
“My mother died when I was eleven
and my father, also a physician, passed away two years ago. … I must confess, I
am not a good speaker nor apt as a teacher, but I do feel God can use my
training as a physician. As humbly as I know how, I want to volunteer to serve
as a medical missionary under our Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board. I
have always thought of Africa but I will go anywhere I am needed.”
Even against a lucrative offer to be a partner with an
accomplished surgeon, Bill made up his mind to pursue his calling. On July 25
1935, he received his appointment from the FMB to head to Wuchow in southern
China. Five weeks before he finally left his beloved Knoxville for China, on
September 1 in the same year, he had this to say at his Broadway Baptist Church:
“I want to go to China because someone has prayed… and God
heard these prayers and has answered as He always does when God’s people pray.
I would rather be going out as God’s missionary this morning than anything else
in the world.”
Bill Wallace (left, back row) (Image source: Wallace Memorial Baptist Church)
Bill would devote his entire life to fulfilling his calling
and in the end, he paid for it with his life. His commitment was so complete
that he remained a bachelor throughout. In the year he was to set out for China
for the first time, he had, in companionship, a young lady whom many had
believed he would marry. Yet the lady later said, “[Marriage] was out of the
question. It would have been bigamy; Bill Wallace was already married to his
work!”
Bill dedicated his service to China through great hardship and
under life-threatening circumstances. He worked for fifteen years through the
Boxer Rebellion and then the Japanese invasion during the Second World War
before the Communist took over China.
Bill Wallace in China (Image source: Jesse Fletcher)
Yet throughout all of this, he never
shirked his responsibilities no matter how tiring or risky it was. Those who
knew and worked closely with him regarded Bill as a tireless labourer for
Christ. His intense adoration for the Lord was a match for his love for those
who loved the Lord. Quickly he gained a wide reputation as a kind but gentle
man, economical with his words but a wonderfully gifted and seemingly inexhaustible
surgeon who centred his life on emulating the gentlest Healer man has known.
Fellow missionary physical Dr Beddoe wrote:
“At the time of the second severe bombing of the hospital,
there was a desperately sick patient on the top floor. He could not possibly be
moved without almost certain death. Wallace stayed by the bed, comforting and
reassuring the patient.
“A bomb hit not more than fifty feet from the bed,
tearing a gaping hole in the concrete roof. In the providence of God, neither
the patient nor Wallace was injured. One of the staff, who was four floors
below at the time, told me he was lifted several inches by the concussion.”
As Bill worked tirelessly through the Japanese bombing raids,
stretchers carrying the wounded would line up the halls, waiting for his
attention. There was even once when he was just about to conducting a surgery when
the hospital took a direct hit. Unperturbed, he completed the operation.
Following his first stint, he returned home for a furlough before heading back
to Wuchow in 1940. China was like an inferno when he arrived but even as the
Japanese were closing in, he refused to leave. Despite all the urgent pleas to
get away, he stubbornly persisted, saying, “I will stay as long as I am able to
serve.”
Invariably in 1944, with the hospital building in such ruins,
he decided to move the entire operation upriver on a boat with news of the
Japanese advancing with hardly a few days to spare. It was a dicey move where
patients including all staff and medical equipment had to be carefully
transported hundreds of miles upstream but once they set up camp, they
continued tending the sick and the suffering until word of the Japanese coming
compelled them to relocate again.
Bill Wallace surveys damage to the Stout Memorial Hospital after the Japanese aerial attack in July 1939 (Image source: Baptist Press)
Once the Japanese were defeated and civil war between the
Nationalists and the Communists broke in China, Wallace committed himself to
return to Wuchow where he repaired the badly damaged Stout Memorial Hospital so
that he could resume operations. Even so, he contracted typhoid fever in 1948 and
nearly died.
By the time he recovered and went back to work, the Communists had
wrestled the country and the Nationalist Chinese fled the mainland and
established the Republic of China, better known as Taiwan. His love for the
Chinese was so compelling that even the xenophobic communist soldiers grudgingly
acknowledged his dedication as he treated their injuries.
Yet his dedication as a medical missionary all came to an end when
local anti-American sentiments arose from America’s engagement in the Korean
War in 1950. Once that became apparent – and dangerous – mission boards were
urgently calling for the repatriation of all missionaries back home. However,
Bill refused.
Maybe he thought that being a devoted and well-known surgeon was
all it took to prove his worth to the Communist Chinese. Perhaps he assumed
that because the Communists themselves had benefited from his surgical skills, his
services would continue to be well accepted no matter the propaganda.
But the
real reason was that he could not bear to leave behind the people he had come
to love so dearly, those who needed his help and those who were willing to know
Christ from his words and actions. Yet the Communist regime did not see things
the same way. With hatred for Americans boiling over, Bill and any other
foreigner were not spared.
On this day, sixty-six years ago, in 1950, local authorities raided
Bill’s home and arrested him just before dawn. In their search of his house,
they allegedly ‘uncovered’ a gun hidden beneath his mattress and duly framed
him as a spy.
Bill Wallace (Image source: Baptist Press)
Following his arrest, a commissar rallied the people of Wuchow to
a public meeting in order to elicit accusations and denouncements against Bill.
He wanted to shame him in public and to confirm once and for all that he was an
enemy of the state. However no one stepped forward. Instead a Roman Catholic
missionary who knew of his compassion, generosity and lovingkindness said, “He
went about doing good.”
Without any viable charges they could stick on him, the
Communists proceeded to conduct an intense and brutal interrogation. Bill was
subjected to sleepless nights and relentless beating until he was forced, under
the threat of death, to make a false confession. For his faith, he was mocked
and tortured. He was also poked and jabbed using bamboo sticks.
All of this
took a serious toll on his physical and mental health and before long, he
became severely depressed and in abject despair. In his final days, he was so
close to the point of insanity according to witnesses who were with him. Still,
his faith in Christ was there for others to see – other than Scripture verses
he pinned on his prison walls, he bore witness to Christ to anyone who went by
his cell.
All of this came to a tragic end two months later. On the
morning of February 10 1951, aged 43 years, Bill Wallace was found hanging from
a crossbeam in his prison cell. Or at least suicide was the official record
from the local authorities as they claim he killed himself amidst his guilt
against the people of Wuchow. Yet when a colleague was permitted to view his
body, he saw little traces of hanging but more evidently were the numerous bodily
marks that indicated horrific physical abuse.
Bill Wallace re-interred in Knoxville in 1985 (Image source: Michael McNeal)
Fearing that the ample evidence of abuse might be exposed, armed
prison guards hurriedly disposed of Bill’s body by burying him in an unmarked
grave. But the faithful among the Chinese Christians could not allow this to
happen and so they took the risk to lay him to rest in a proper ceremony with
only a solitary armed escort to protect them. Above his grave, a marker was
placed with the inscription, ‘For Me to Live is Christ.’ Bill’s remains did not
return home to Knoxville, Tennessee until as late as 1985.
In memory of Bill Wallace, 1908-1951 (Image source: William Lyman Sr)
In all the years since then, many consider their personal
champions as people who faced great odds but overcome them in the arena of
sports. There would have to be those who had to overcome incredible hardship
with little in their pockets and yet build a career and life of success,
summarily becoming an inspiration to an entire nation.
Those of the older
generation who might not have heard of Bill’s exploits in China point to those
who either risked or sacrificed their lives in overcoming the Nazis and their
partners in war. They may also consider the ingenuity of the few whose discoveries
helped to save mankind from diseases that had debilitated human lives for so
many generations.
The memorial of Bill Wallace in Knoxville (Image source: Michael McNeal)
Against all of these great men and women, Bill Wallace of
China – as he is affectionately known – doesn’t appear high on the list for
most people. It would be hard to even imagine any of them being familiar with
his name. Yet for all the quietness by which he went sacrificing his life to
serve the forgotten people in a far-flung isolated nook of China, few of these
heroes match what he had to endure at the hands of his torturers.
Even fewer
match his motive for a life with such a tragic end. We must remember that when all
is finally said and done, Bill could have settled for a lucrative medical
career offered to him on a silver platter and in the comfort of a familiar
hearth.
He really didn’t have to do what he did. But he was obedient
to God. When he heard His call, he knew his destiny was made up for him. And so
he did it because he finally knew his purpose in life was now shaped by the God
he loved so dearly. He knew the great opportunity that God had opened up him in
China. In fact in his introductory letter to the FMB, he quoted Luke 10:2,
writing:
“The harvest truly is great… pray ye therefore… that He would
send forth labourers into the harvest.”
A stone marker replica of Bill Wallace's original 1951 grave in Wuchow, China (Image source: Rudy Hoggard)
That was why his Christian Chinese friends in Wuchow risked
incarceration and punishment to install a fitting monument on his grave and put
up the Apostle Paul’s words in Philippians 1:21, which says, “For me to live is
Christ and to die is gain” (KJV). As pastor and historian Jesse C. Fletcher
wrote in his 1963 biography, ‘Bill Wallace of China,’ the Chinese were not
unfamiliar with Christian preaching but “in Bill Wallace, they began to see one
and that made the difference.”
To Christians at large, Bill’s works might qualify him as a
martyr but for different reasons. Some say it was the way he died so
tragically. Some contend that it was his fierce refusal to leave but to face
the wrath of the Communists. Others believe that in light of the waves of anti-American
fury, he stood in defiance.
The late Everley Hayes (1916-1998), a missionary
nurse who worked alongside Bill in Wuchow and the one who identified his body, put
it differently, saying, “He was a martyr not because he died but because he so
identified with the Chinese that they considered him one of them.”
In other words, Bill’s life was a love-filled sacrifice for a
people in the opposite side of the world he knew.
“Many think of martyrs
as those long-faced people. But I knew a Dr Wallace who was very much
interested in everything around him. He was a martyr not because he died in
service but because he so identified with the Chinese people that they considered
him one of them. And they loved him,” she added.
A commemoration plaque by the Stout Memorial Baptist Hospital Nursing Students, Wuchow, China, 1998 (Image source: Michael McNeal)
Today Bill Wallace is honoured in different parts of the world.
As Fletcher’s biography opened a whole new generation to Bill’s exemplary God-inspired
missions, it also inspired the 1967 release of a motion picture by the same name
produced four years after his publication by Logos Productions.*
* Note: A trailer for the motion picture can be viewed here
His memory also lives on in the Wallace Memorial Baptist Church,
founded two years after his death, and its dedicated sanctuary that included a Bill
Wallace Room. In the church where Bill was part of before his departure,
the Broadway Baptist Church also has a
similarly dedicated room as well.
Movie poster for Bill Wallace of China (Image source: WorthPoint)
In Busan, South Korea’s second largest city in the
southwestern tip of the peninsula, there is now the Wallace
Memorial Baptist Hospital while at the University of Tennessee Medical Centre,
the Baptist Student Union is named for Bill.
Perhaps Bill’s biggest legacy is the inspiration to be God’s
light to shine on others, to do good and to remain faithful in service until
the very end. That is likely how Bill Wallace of China himself would like to be
remembered.
Reading Sources:
- Bridges, Erich (Feb 2011) 50 Years After: Bill Wallace and the Meaning
of Heroism (Nashville, TN: Baptist Press) Available at http://www.bpnews.net/10349/50-years-after-bill-wallace-and-the-meaning-of-heroism
- Morgan, Robert J (Nov
2010) On This Day in Christian History:
365 Amazing and Inspiring Stories about Saints, Martyrs and Heroes (Nashville,
TN: Thomas Nelson) Available at https://www.amazon.com/This-Day-Christian-History-Inspiring/dp/0785231897/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
- Fletcher, Jesse F (Dec
1995) Bill Wallace of China (Library
of Baptist Classics, First Edition) (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman Press)
- Wallace Memory Baptist
Church, Dr Bill Wallace Biography.
Available at http://www.wmbc.net/#/welcome/our-heritage
Note: The story of the re-issue
of the book Bill Wallace of China
(Broadman and Holman) is available in video format at https://vimeo.com/38334315
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