There was a surprising amount of sympathy for Japan in Europe, especially from her former military ally Britain. ‘Technically,’ The Times argued, ‘there could be no doubt that Japan had put herself in the wrong. But fundamentally it was generally felt that Japan had by no means a bad case.’ Even the Foreign Office, believing a Japanese promise that her troops would be withdrawn into the South Manchurian Railway zone once peace and order had been restored, felt that Japan was best suited to end the ‘brigandage’ that threatened Manchuria’s prosperity.7
Appeasement was the shameful hallmark of the 1930s, with the Foreign Secretary Neville Chamberlain, The Times editor Geoffrey Dawson and Nancy Astor’s ‘Cliveden Set’ the main offenders. The Chinese boycott in Shanghai had challenged Japan to defend her interests in East Asia and appeasement merely opened the way for her next aggressive move.
At the corner of The Bund and Nanking Road was the Cathay Hotel, built by the businessman–playboy Sir Victor Sassoon in the art deco style and capped by a tower that rivalled Venice’s campanile. The Cathay opened to great fanfare as the most luxurious hotel in Asia in 1928. The following year Noel Coward penned one of his most famous plays, Private Lives, in one of its suites while recuperating from a bout of flu. When he recovered, he visited the Shanghai Club and endeared himself to members by placing his cheek on ‘the longest bar in the world’ and announcing he could see the curvature of the earth’s surface.
New Year’s Eve 1931 was celebrated in typically extravagant style in the Cathay’s ballroom. Sassoon – heir to his family’s fortune and a cousin of the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon – and the Jardine Matheson taipan John Keswick, his face covered by a ‘grotesquely funny’ mask, led 400 guests in bacchanalian revelry. As the Westminster chimes of the Custom House clock rang out midnight, a large turkey was wheeled into the room. Revellers whooped and cheered as an exotic dancer dressed as a little chick jumped from the turkey’s breast and shimmied to the rhythms of the dance band.
But the chimes of ‘Big Ching’, as the Chinese called the clock, heralded a period of doubt and insecurity which not even vintage champagne could obliterate. The Japanese minister in Peking, M. Shigemitsu, added to the gloom in an ominous New Year message in which he declared that 1932 presented Japan and China with ‘ponderous problems awaiting adjustment’. Nor could the British consul, Sir John Brenan, offer much hope. ‘The best I can suggest for 1932,’ he said, ‘is that it should help forward all efforts toward international understanding and discourage pessimism.’8
The spirit of the times was perhaps symbolised in the actions of a Chinese merchant named Lee Chou, who was jailed for two months on New Year’s Eve for selling 69 bottles of counterfeit Hennessy cognac. Lee mixed pure alcohol with brown sugar in the hope that revellers wouldn’t notice the difference.9
On New Year’s Day the Young Marshal’s remaining forces in Manchuria began to withdraw south of the Great Wall and west into Jehol. Resistance had been sporadic; some commanders had fought valiantly but others, lacking any assistance from Nanking, had done secret deals with the Japanese. Two days later the last vestiges of Chinese authority evaporated in Manchuria, leaving Japan in almost total control of its railways, minerals, ports and primary industry.10
Japanese jingoists then set about fomenting trouble in Shanghai to distract attention from their war-mongering in Manchuria and to end the crippling anti-Japanese boycott. The task of creating a casus belli was given to the military attaché at the Japanese Consulate, an unsavoury character named Major Ryukichi Tanaka.
His first move was to hire a group of Chinese thugs from the San Yu towel factory in Hongkew on 18 January to beat up five Japanese monks and novices belonging to the militant pan-Asian Buddhist Nichiren sect, one of whom later died of his injuries. Other hirelings stoned children on their way to the Japanese Primary School in the International Settlement.11
Two days later Tanaka incited 40 members of a seinedan, or young men’s association, to destroy the San Yu towel factory in a pre-dawn raid. In pouring rain, the Japanese set fire to storage rooms and attacked a nearby police post, stabbing two Chinese constables to death. The culprits were rounded up but under the extrality waiver were released without charge. These crimes were the first committed by Japanese civilian ruffians who would become known in Shanghai as ronin, a reference to the lordless samurai from the time of the shoguns who operated outside the law.12
On the afternoon of the 20th Tanaka organised a protest rally of some 1000 Japanese residents at the Japanese Club in Boone Road. ‘Fiery and excited speeches were made, expressing indignation over attacks on the Japanese priests and the insult to the Emperor,’ the North-China Herald reported. The meeting called on Tokyo to send military units to Shanghai to protect Japanese citizens and suppress anti-Japanese movements. The mob then rampaged through the streets, attacking Chinese citizens and destroying Chinese shops, with the intention of provoking a backlash.13
The Japanese consul, Kuramatsu Murai, demanded an apology from the Mayor of Greater Shanghai, General Wu Teh-Chen, for the attacks on the monks, plus compensation and the immediate disbandment of all anti-Japanese organisations, especially the militant National Salvation Association.14
On the weekend of 23–24 January 1932 a Japanese cruiser, an aircraft carrier and four destroyers joined the existing force of three cruisers and three destroyers on the river downstream from Shanghai. Mayor Wu hoped to stall the Japanese until he had consulted the Nationalist Government at Nanking but instead was given an ultimatum expiring at 6 pm on the 28th. He immediately took the overnight train to Nanking.
Chiang Kai-shek had reached a deal with Wang Ching-wei under which Wang became prime minister and Chiang took charge of military operations against the Communists. Mayor Wu was informed that Chiang had no intention of fighting the Japanese and thus provoking a full-scale war. The city’s defences were to be left to the 19th Route Army, a revolutionary Cantonese force quartered in Chapei. Its young commander, General Tsai Ting-kai, was anti- Japanese and relished the possibility of getting to grips with the enemy.
Bill Donald was in Nanking for a meeting of the Chinese Indemnity Committee. At 11 o’clock on Sunday night, he was asleep in his hotel when Mayor Wu woke him and urged him to come back to Shanghai to help him deal with the Japanese. Donald had intended flying to Peking the following day to rejoin the Young Marshal but 45 minutes later was on a train bound for Shanghai.
‘The mayor is a very old friend of mine so I was able to speak frankly to him,’ Donald wrote to Herbie Elliston. ‘By the time we reached Shanghai, I got him to agree to the acceptance of all the demands without condition, if the residing consuls and municipal authorities were convinced that the Japanese would employ force.’15
Early on the morning of Monday, 25 January, Donald ascertained that the general feeling was that the Japanese would use any pretext to send in their armed forces. The Japanese Consulate heard of Donald’s intervention and issued a press release that ‘Captain Donald, Chang’s former adviser’ had urged acceptance of the Japanese terms. While Donald was amused at his military title, he realised from the tone of the press release that acceptance was the last thing the Japanese wanted.
During the 26th and 27th of January Mayor Wu persuaded Chinese associations and guilds to call off the boycott. His acceptance of all terms was handed to the Japanese consul Murai around two o’clock on the afternoon of the 28th, four hours before the ultimatum expired. Wu promised that the anti-Japanese boycott would be ended, the assailants of the Japanese holy men punished and anti-Japanese societies disbanded. He had also ordered the suppression of an anti-Japanese newspaper, which had crowed over a recent assassination attempt on Hirohito in a story headlined ‘unfortunately bullet missed: assassin escaped’.
The new chairman of the Municipal Council, Brigadier-General E. B. Macnaghten of the British-American Tobacco Company, then gave the Japanese the perfect opportunit
y to mobilise their forces. Without informing the Chinese, he declared a state of emergency in the International Settlement from 4 pm on Thursday the 28th. The Volunteer Corps immediately deployed along the boundary with Chapei overlooking North Station, where General Tsai’s main defences were located; the British Army took up positions along a line extending into open country; and the American Marines were posted on the boundary between the settlement and the country.
The north-eastern sector where Little Tokyo abutted Chapei was the responsibility of the Japanese. That afternoon, the Japanese Naval Landing Force, accompanied by dozens of armed ronin, advanced down North Szechuen Road to occupy a salient protruding into the Chinese district.
Meanwhile, the consular body held a meeting at which Murai stated that the mayor had accepted the Japanese demands and that his assurances were considered ‘highly satisfactory’. As the British consul, Sir John Brenan, was leaving the meeting, he said to Murai, ‘At least we can be sure that there will be no trouble tonight?’ The Japanese consul replied in the affirmative.16
Japan’s military commanders, however, were determined to inflict a humiliating defeat on the Chinese. That evening, Admiral Kiochi Shiozawa told Hallett Abend over drinks in his flagship, the cruiser Idzumo, that the mayor’s acceptance of Japanese terms was ‘beside the point’; he still intended to occupy Chapei to demonstrate Japan’s military supremacy over the Chinese.
The Japanese had a garrison of 2000 Imperial Marines at Hongkew and 1200 reinforcements were available in the Japanese warships. As a sign of intent, thousands of Japanese civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, had been evacuated from Hongkew over the past few days and returned to Japan.
By 8.30 that evening the naval units in Little Tokyo were posing with their war equipment for Japanese news photographers. Then just after 11 pm a detachment of 400 bluejackets stormed into Chapei, with hand-held flares and the searchlights of armoured cars illuminating the darkened and deserted streets. ‘I was at the mayor’s house in Avenue Haig until 10.30 that night,’ Donald relates. ‘I got to the Astor House Hotel where I was staying at about 11 o’clock. As I reached Soochow Creek, I could hear rifle and machine-gun firing the other side of North Szechuen Road.’
Admiral Shiozawa was not expecting any organised resistance, but Chinese snipers from the 19th Route Army, reinforced by members of Tu’s Green Gang, had taken up positions on top of walls and in the upstairs rooms of buildings. As Japanese patrols approached North Station in the heart of Chapei, they opened fire with rifles and machine-guns at the well-illuminated Japanese force. Large numbers of bluejackets were caught in the crossfire and mown down.
Misty rain had fallen earlier in the evening but the skies were clear when groups of Westerners in evening dress, hearing gunfire over the sound of the dance bands, poured out of fashionable hotels and restaurants and took taxis to the frontline in North Szechuen Road. As bullets ricocheted off the sides of buildings, they stood around smoking and drinking and eating sandwiches from local cafes.
Hallett Abend lived at Broadway Mansions in Hongkew and had only a short distance to walk. As he joined the spectators, he heard one European man say to another, ‘Hope the Japs will teach the cocky Chinese a good lesson.’ His companion replied, ‘Yeah, Japan is saving the white man the job of bringing the Chinese to reason.’17
Japanese reinforcements were cheered as they roared down side streets on motorbikes, with machine-gunners in their sidecars blazing indiscriminately into the dark. The Japanese commanders had expected the Chinese defenders to break and run when confronted by fast-moving mobile units. Instead, their troops soon found it impossible to advance any further against heavy fire from the front, while snipers harassed them from the rear.
The Japanese suffered further casualties when the 19th Route Army opened fire from an armoured train in the sidings at North Station. Forced on the defensive, they erected barbed-wire barricades and posted sentries at intervals of 20 or 30 metres to secure the area.
At a quarter to midnight Mayor Wu rang Donald and said he had received a proclamation from the Japanese admiral, stating that his marines had been sniped at while they were taking up their positions ‘to protect the International Settlement’. Donald held the receiver of his telephone out of his bedroom window to confirm that the Japanese were indeed in action in Chapei.
One of the officers at the Chinese Maritime Customs Service was Thomas Macauley, a red-headed Ulsterman and former member of the Royal Army Medical Corps who lived with his Cantonese wife, Ling-ying Lee, his mother-in-law and four young children on the third floor of the Ramus apartment building in Hongkew. ‘We were on the crossroads opposite Japanese naval headquarters,’ his son Bill Macauley says, ‘and we could see the Japanese firing field guns down the road into Chapei.’18
Gordon Bowden took his six-year-old son Ivor to the top of the North-China Daily News building on The Bund. ‘We looked down and could see the fighting in Chapei,’ Ivor relates. ‘It was night-time and the muzzle flashes of the guns pierced the darkness. My father was taking the family on his leave to England and in the morning our Blue Funnel ship sailed past Chapei and we saw the damage.’19
Bill Macauley’s family woke up to find their apartment block ‘surrounded by Japanese marines with their long bayonets’. During the night, Chinese snipers had fired down on the Japanese from the roof and they had been ordered to search the five-storey building. ‘My maternal grandmother was holding on to me because I was scared stiff,’ Macauley says.
The Japanese went rampaging through our flat looking for the snipers but all they found were empty cartridges on the roof. That was my first experience of Japanese anger and I was absolutely petrified. My father organised a convoy and the whole family was evacuated to the Custom House on The Bund. We stayed there until the trouble was over.20
That morning Admiral Shiozawa had sent in bombers from his aircraft carriers to bomb Chapei. The main target was the armoured train and the station’s modern concrete building, but many bombs were also dropped on residential areas, killing hundreds of Chinese civilians and starting numerous fires.
Eleanor Hinder and Viola Smith witnessed the first night of hostilities from the balcony of their sixth-floor flat in Young Allen Court. In the morning, a young Chinese friend and her child arrived from North Szechuen Road seeking shelter. They invited her to stay but later that day a bomb demolished the house opposite their block. They quickly loaded a few possessions into Viola’s Buick coupé and drove to the home of friends in Avenue Haig, Frenchtown. In the words of The Times correspondent, the bombing ‘created the impression that a policy of frightfulness had been adopted in order to induce the evacuation of the Chinese troops’.21
The Japanese sent scores of ronin – many of them shopkeepers, bank clerks and factory employees armed with pistols, rifles, swords and baseball bats – into the International Settlement during Saturday 30 January. American Marines detained 14 such gangsters who had infiltrated the American sector with the intention of stirring up trouble and there were dozens in other parts of the city.22
As darkness enclosed the war zone, Japanese naval sharpshooters moved up and down the streets of Hongkew, shooting out overhead electric lights. At 8.15 the US Marines in Haiphong Road encountered two groups of armed Japanese who fired over the head of a Marine sentry into a Chinese district. The sentry detained nine of the men.23
At 8.25 pm two Chinese were shot and killed by Japanese ronin in front of the Japanese marine barracks at 102 Gordon Road inside the American area. Twenty minutes later four more plain-clothed Japanese were detained in the same district, while others were found to have taken charge of a police substation at the corner of Robison and Penang roads. They were evicted by British troops after a fierce struggle.
The ronin extended their control from Haining Road up to Soochow Creek. When the Municipal Police withdrew its patrols to avoid clashes, the Japanese were
virtually in control of the whole of Hongkew. They assumed police powers and stopped traffic and searched cars and civilians; Chinese citizens came in for rough treatment and a number were bayoneted to death.
‘The careless employment of a number of Japanese bad characters as reservists, whose conduct was inexcusable, led to much cruelty and injustice against harmless non-combatants,’ The Times correspondent commented.24 The main effect of all this ‘frightfulness’ was that half a million Chinese in Chapei and Hongkew deserted their homes and sought refuge in the International Settlement, many losing all their possessions in the process. ‘From a military point of view,’ The Times noted, ‘the frightfulness had no result.’
For the next 30 days the 19th Route Army battled the Japan- ese in Chapei. General Tsai’s troops outnumbered the Japanese marines ten to one and were winning a decisive victory until the Japanese Army, much to the embarrassment of the Imperial Navy, diverted 20,000 regular troops from Manchuria to save the bluejackets from extinction.
Chiang Kai-shek ordered his two crack National Guard divisions to join the 19th Route Army but placed them under General Tsai’s command so they could be passed off as Cantonese units to avoid giving Japan an excuse to extend the conflict.25 Wang Ching-wei came up with a suitably face-saving slogan: ‘Resisting while negotiating’. Chiang’s order to General Tsai left little doubt about his intentions: ‘The 19th Route Army should take advantage of its victorious position in the last dozen days, avoid decisive fighting with Japan and end the war now.’26
Meanwhile, Manchuria’s 30 million people living in an area one-third the size of Western Australia were absorbed into the Japanese Empire as members of a puppet state named Manchukuo (Manchu Land) and on 9 March the last Manchu emperor, Pu Yi, was sworn in as president (and a couple of years later elevated to emperor).
Shanghai Fury Page 30