A Songwriter’s Tribute

• By Peter Harmsen
• 12 March, 2013
• 48 Comments

Frank and Florence Rawlinson.

Christian missionary Frank Rawlinson, born in Britain and educated in the United States,  had lived in Shanghai almost his entire adult life when war broke out between China and Japan in 1937.  As a lover of Chinese culture, he was horrified by the naked Japanese aggression he saw played out in the country he had come to consider a second home. As a pacifist, he was opposed to war in principle, but had gradually arrived at the conclusion that China had no other choice but to resist.

War erupted in northern China in early July 1937 and spread to Shanghai one month later. On Saturday August 14, the second day of battle over the city, Chinese planes attempted raids against the Japanese cruiser Izumo moored in the Huangpu River. None of the attacks was successful, but resulted in two separate tragedies in mid-afternoon, when Chinese aircraft accidentally dropped bombs over heavily crowded areas of Shanghai.

Rawlinson was killed in one of these disasters. He had been driving in his car with his wife Florence and his daughter Jean to fetch the afternoon newspaper and was on his way home when one of the bombs exploded near a theater crowded with refugees. Rawlinson was hit in the chest by shrapnel and died within minutes, as his wife and daughter were watching in despair.

Many years later, Jean’s son, and Rawlinson’s grandson, Grayson Hugh, wrote a song, For The Innocent, as a tribute to “a peaceful man” who was “caught in someone else’s war.”  The song, included in Hugh’s 1992 record “Road To Freedom,” also honors all lives lost in war. In its raw emotion, it shows how war is a traumatic experience whose shadows linger decades after the guns go silent.

Click on this link to listen to For The Innocent:

For The Innocent