As soon as the war started in North China, the Italian mission had disappeared back to Italy, leaving the combat field open to Chennault. He ordered the Chinese Air Force’s Curtiss Hawk dive-bombers to attack the Japanese cruisers, while its Northrop light bombers blasted Japanese naval headquarters aboard the heavy cruiser Idzumo.5
On Saturday morning a typhoon roared in from the East China Sea, subjecting Shanghai to 100-kilometre-an-hour winds and providing, according to The Times correspondent, ‘blessed relief in the present midsummer heat’. Down on Nanking Road, beggars and refugees camping out in the street were scattered about like chaff.6
At four o’clock a squadron of ten Chinese aircraft from Hungjao airfield on the outskirts of the city crossed Frenchtown and flew north on a course that would take them over the 27 warships, many of them Japanese but also British and American, on the Whangpoo. Japanese anti-aircraft gunners greeted the planes with a tremendous bombardment that pockmarked the air with black puffs of smoke and kept the Chinese pilots at high altitude. Low-lying cloud cover also caused poor visibility above the city skyline, making it difficult for them to see their targets.
In the confusion two pilots tried to sink HMS Cumberland and another attacked USS Augusta off Woosung, both without success. ‘Neither warship fired, as it was believed that in the stormy weather the Chinese mistook both ships for Japanese,’ The Times reported.7
A few minutes later a Japanese fighter attacked one of the American-made Northrop bombers carrying two bombs. The badly wounded Chinese pilot turned towards his airfield but the Japanese plane was catching him, so he released his bombload and instantly gained height. He intended the bombs to land on the open spaces of the racecourse; instead, observers watching from The Bund saw them disappear at the point where Tibet Road crossed Avenue Edward VII. ‘There followed immediately a huge belch of red flame and a tremendous explosion,’ The Times man reported.
Emily Hahn was now on a Shanghai-bound train that was taking a roundabout route to avoid the fighting. ‘All afternoon we went slowly through flat, rich country, stopping every few yards,’ she wrote. ‘Towards evening, a Japanese plane came along directly over us, but that day the Japanese were not bombing trains – not yet.’8
Five thousand refugees had assembled at the Great World amusement centre in Avenue Edward VII at the junction with Tibet and Yunnan roads to receive free rice. The traffic lights in the centre of the intersection had just turned red when the crusading American Frank Rawlinson drove up Yunnan Road with his wife and daughter in his small car. He stopped the car at the lights and, hearing planes overhead, opened his door and stepped out on to the road to investigate. Just as his feet touched the ground, he uttered a cry, threw up his arms and fell down.9
His wife Florence Lang Rawlinson dragged his body back into the car and drove off towards the hospital unaware that he had been shot through the heart by a machine-gun bullet. The car had just turned the corner into Tibet Road when the crowded plaza exploded behind them.
Tragically, both bombs had fallen 300 metres short of the racecourse and landed on refugees, pedestrians and assorted vehicles. Dozens of cars were peppered with shrapnel and their occupants incinerated by exploding petrol tanks, while hundreds of pedestrians were knocked down like skittles for a block in every direction. The worst carnage was among the refugees in front of the Great World, so often the scene of Chinese festivities. Mangled bodies with most of their clothing burned away littered the pavement in smouldering heaps.10
Dr Rawlinson’s friends Viola Smith and Eleanor Hinder had driven from their flat in Bubbling Well Road to visit the cable office at the Cathay Hotel. They found Nanking Road blocked and had to turn around. As they drove down Hankow Road to Tibet Road, frightened people fleeing from the first blast climbed over the hood of their car. It was impossible with the crush of bodies to turn left, so Viola swung right. Just as she did so, the second bomb, which must have had a delayed fuse, exploded at the intersection. They missed the blast by three blocks.11
John Powell was standing on the roof of the American Club, opposite the vast Municipal Administration building in Foochow Road, watching the dogfights between Chinese and Japanese planes when the bombs struck the plaza. ‘The explosion shook the entire city,’ he said. ‘I hurried to the scene, and for the first time in my extensive coverage of battles, I actually saw human blood running in the gutters.’12 The two bombs killed 450 people and wounded 850.
Buzz Farmer had scrambled on to the roof of the Daily News building on The Bund. The hands of the nearby Cathay Hotel clock now showed 4.20. He had a good view of the thousands of homeless refugees milling around the intersection of The Bund and Nanking Road, with the Idzumo clearly visible at its moorings near Garden Bridge.13
Suddenly, he saw several Chinese chasing a Japanese student wearing a baseball cap. They knocked him down with half a brick and proceeded to beat him to death. Farmer watched appalled. Then the sound of more aircraft engines approaching from the south dragged his eyes away from the scene to the river.14
Within a few minutes of the first bombing five Chinese bombers came droning down the Whangpoo between The Bund and Pootung towards the Idzumo. Every Japanese ship on the river threw up an ear-splitting barrage of anti-aircraft fire. The bomber crews had been trained to drop their bombs at a fixed air speed from a height of 620 metres. According to Claire Chennault, bad weather forced the pilots to attack at a lower altitude, which put the planes into a shallow dive that increased their air speed. Tragically, the pilots neglected to adjust their bomb sights for the new conditions.
Five bombs were dropped. All missed their target and two plunged towards the Palace and Cathay hotels. ‘I watched both bombs skim 50 feet overhead,’ Farmer said. ‘One disappeared into Nanking Road. Then the roof of the Palace Hotel erupted.’
Farmer was showered with debris. He ran downstairs. On the corner of The Bund and Nanking Road, a decapitated Sikh policeman lay with his arms outstretched as though resisting the traffic. People were burning to death in blazing motor vehicles.15
The blue clothing of hundreds of coolies turned red with blood. Refugees lay in grotesque heaps in doorways. ‘The sticky-sweet stench of blood hung in my nostrils until I could taste it,’ Farmer said. The young West Australian walked up the left-hand side of Nanking Road counting the dead. Across the tramline sprawled the body of a tall European man, his white flannel suit unmarked, so neatly had his head been separated from his torso. The body count had reached 200 when the Australian heard his name. ‘Come and have a drink, Farmer,’ shouted his news editor Percy Finch, ‘before they mistake you for a corpse.’
Late that night Emily Hahn made it home to discover that more than 1200 Chinese and 26 foreigners had been killed in Shanghai’s ‘Bloody Saturday’, including an Australian-born American barmaid known to Shanghai drinkers simply as ‘Dodo Dynamite’. She was one of several people killed in the entrance of the Palace Hotel.16
Probably the most remarkable escape of all was that of 28-year-old Australian nurse Elsie Farrell. Miss Farrell had just left the Palace Hotel through that same entrance and was about to take a lift in a rickshaw to her home in Frenchtown when Montagu Smith, the British manager of ICI, offered her a lift in his car. As they drove along Tibet Road, the car was suddenly engulfed in ‘a dark grey haze’.17
‘The next thing I knew,’ Miss Farrell says, ‘I was scrambling over a pile of bodies. I could not see because of blood pouring down my face. I put up my hand to feel my eyes. When I found they were there, I felt so happy I couldn’t think of the poor wretches over whom I was stumbling. All I had in mind was to get away.’
She was taken to the French Hospital where it was discovered she had a piece of shrapnel embedded in her head. As the hospital was packed with wounded and there would be a long delay before she could be treated, she took a rickshaw to the Country Hospital in Great Western Road where she worked.
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sp; Gordon Bowden visited her there in his capacity as an officer of the Australia and New Zealand Society and found her ‘comfortable and cheerful’.18 Montagu Smith had lost an eye and one of his arms but survived.
‘Nobody deplores more than we the terribly tragic accidental bombing by two damaged Northrop planes,’ Mayling Chiang said in a statement from Nanking.
It is officially confirmed that both pilots were wounded and that [anti-aircraft shots] damaged the bomb racks, which caused the bombs to break loose. Both wounded pilots are in Shanghai hospitals. It is incredible that the belief exists in some places that China deliberately bombed the International Settlement. What for?19
On 17 August the first contingent of 800 British women and children was evacuated from Shanghai. ‘The ship taking us to Hong Kong dropped anchor at the mouth of the Yangtze River out of sight of the combatants and we were rushed down the river in a British destroyer,’ Stephanie Sherwood, Roy Fernandez’s daughter, says. ‘It was quite frightening to hear the shelling over the ship. Everyone knew that we could be hit at any time.’20
American civilians were also ordered to evacuate. Carl Crow, who had retired from newspapers to launch a successful advertising agency, was evacuated to Manila with his wife Helen in the Dollar Line steamship SS President Hoover. After 36 years’ hard work in China, he left with just one suitcase and his new camel-hair overcoat. ‘Leaving the servants was the most difficult problem we had to face,’ he wrote, ‘for, in Chinese style, we had been adopted by them and were members of their family.’21
The evacuees included a group of American tourists, one of whose members had been killed in the Palace Hotel, many nightclub entertainers – tap dancers, crooners and minstrels, and two Filipino orchestras – and ‘a surprisingly large number of American prostitutes’.22
Alan Raymond also chose this moment to quit the city. He would later claim the war had destroyed his marble business but it seems likely that pressure from his creditors played a hand in his departure. Raymond moved to Hong Kong and got a job on one of the local newspapers as a journalist. He also became a jockey and trainer, but his racing career ended abruptly when he was expelled from the Hong Kong Jockey Club over ‘an incident connected with the running of a pony at the Macao Races’.23
Hallett Abend was in North China and missed Bloody Saturday. When he returned to Shanghai on 18 August, he found himself cut off from his flat and the New York Times office, both of which were on the sixteenth floor of Broadway Mansions in Hongkew. He and his assistant Anthony Billingham, a 35-year-old former US Marine, moved into a hotel near The Bund.
Late on the morning of 23 August the two Americans went shopping for new clothes and other essential items in Nanking Road. Abend was parked outside the Wing On department store while Billingham bought the last item on their list, a pair of binoculars in order to watch the fighting close-up. Big Bertie, the clock at the Shanghai Race Club building 50 metres away, had just struck one when he noticed Chinese pedestrians gazing skywards at the silvery shape of an aircraft. Moments later, a bomb exploded in Nanking Road. It blew in the side of the Sincere department store and sent thousands of metal fragments crashing through the windows of the Wing On.24
Abend stepped over the bodies of the dead and dying and entered the department store to look for Billingham. The electrical circuits had fused and in the semi-darkness the orderly department store had been turned into a charnel house of human limbs and headless bodies. ‘Chinese shop girls lay on one side of the wrecked silk counters and customers were piled on the other,’ Buzz Farmer later wrote. ‘Toys from a burst window covered one big heap of mangled people.’25
Billingham had been seriously injured and was bleeding profusely. Abend found him but then lost him in the crush.
Dr Bill O’Hara, the Gallipoli veteran, was in his surgery on the fifth floor of the China United Building, three blocks from the blast. He dashed to the scene with his medical bag and treated some of the injured and then drove in his car to the Country Hospital to offer his assistance to the overstretched medical staff. The bomb had killed 612 people and wounded 482. While he was there, Hallett Abend arrived looking for Billingham. He found him being unloaded from an ambulance. O’Hara checked Billingham’s injuries and operated immediately. It was after 4 pm when he emerged from the theatre. Abend was still waiting for news of his assistant’s condition. ‘You look pretty badly shaken up,’ the Australian said. ‘You need a double jolt of brandy and so do I.’
They drove to the British Country Club in Bubbling Well Road. When Abend stepped out of the car, O’Hara asked, ‘Why are you limping?’ Abend was so shell-shocked he was unaware he had a large piece of glass imbedded in his right foot and a shrapnel wound at the back of his neck.26
Three days later Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen was badly wounded on the Nanking–Shanghai road when a Japanese fighter pilot machine-gunned his Armstrong-Siddeley sedan, despite the large Union Jack marking on its roof. Tokyo blamed ‘outrageous Chinese soldiery’ for the attack and denied any Japanese aircraft were anywhere near the scene.
Minutes later, on the same road, the open-top tourer carrying Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Bill Donald from their Nanking base on a morale-boosting mission to the besieged city crashed into a bomb crater. Madame Chiang was thrown over the Australian’s head and knocked unconscious. As she lay on the road, Donald recited a couplet over her prone figure:
She flies through the air with the greatest of ease
This daring young woman who fights Japanese.27
Mayling had broken a rib in the accident. ‘It hurts to breathe,’ she gasped. ‘Then don’t breathe,’ Donald growled (but said to himself, ‘She’s broken a rib’). Mayling carried on bravely with her visit to wounded Chinese soldiers in Shanghai hospitals and returned to Nanking in the morning. ‘Why were you so cruel out at the wreck?’ she asked Donald. The Australian smiled. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘once you let a woman lie down and think she’s hurt, she never gets up.’28
Every day the Japanese increased the pressure on Chiang Kai-shek’s battered legions. Japanese shells from Chapei screamed over the foreign concessions on a five-kilometre arc to explode in Nantao where 20,000 Chinese troops were hold- ing out. Japanese destroyers moved up and down the Whangpoo like mobile artillery batteries, indiscriminately pounding civilian and military targets in the Chinese districts.29
Donald claimed the Japanese had made a serious blunder in believing that the Chinese Government would follow precedent and seek peace on any terms in the face of Japan’s mechanised units and terror bombing. ‘The situation is that because China refused to comply, the Japanese have suffered grave loss of prestige,’ he wrote from Nanking in his old newspaper, The Argus.30
In Chapei, a so-called ‘Doomed Battalion’ of 500 Chinese troops held the Continental Bank godown on the north bank of Soochow Creek, sheltering behind sacks of rice as the building was torn to shreds by Japanese machine-gunners. One night a brave girl guide swam the creek to present the troops with a Nationalist flag, which flew defiantly from the top of the building.31
Eleanor Hinder had taken on the additional task of supplying rice to destitute Chinese families. She kept in touch with Florence Rawlinson, who had returned to the United States following her husband’s death. ‘What a terrible tragic month it has been,’ she wrote on 14 September.
Yesterday the Chinese made a strategic retreat to their first line of defence taking themselves out of the area within sound and range of the navy’s guns . . . They are of course still in Pootung and so we are not finished with the naval bombardment. Nor the air raids, nor the dropping of shells in the foreign areas.
I am still at work trying to rescue food stocks and get them into circulation. We are alright for the present and the coastal ships have now opened up a trade and are bringing in some cargoes. The Council has imported rice – 7000 tons which it is holding as a reserve.
My own w
ork [as industrial secretary] will open up again very slowly. I have computed that 70% of the small-scale industry and 60% of the large-scale industry were in the Northern and Eastern districts, and these for the moment are all out of commission. What will be found to be intact when it is possible to return to these areas no one can tell. Even in the areas not occupied only about one-fourth of the workers in the cotton mills and less in the case of small industries are back at work. It will be many a long day before Shanghai recovers.32
Chapei blazed again. ‘Hundreds of thousands of Chinese homes, shops and small factories were destroyed in that fearful holocaust,’ Buzz Farmer wrote. ‘It illuminated the roof of our world, as though the dome of hell had been lifted for a night.’ The arsonists were Chinese soldiers who had begun to implement a scorched earth policy on Chiang’s orders to deny these properties to the Japanese.33
After a siege lasting four days, the survivors of the ‘Doomed Battalion’ made a fighting retreat over the Tibet Road Bridge to the International Settlement. The 377 men, women and children included seven smartly uniformed girls, who carried the battalion’s standard, and a boy of 14 who had a wooden sword in one hand and a grenade in the other.
Three Welsh Fusiliers remained in the blockhouse beside the bridge under heavy fire all night to disarm the Chinese fighters and give first aid to the wounded. They reported that the Chinese rifles were still hot when they were handed over.34
Buzz Farmer watched the survivors march off to an internment camp. ‘They looked as though a high wind would blow them away,’ he wrote. ‘A few carried oiled-paper umbrellas. One actually carried a canary in a cage. Many walked hand in hand. It seemed preposterous that these thin, tattered boys had held up the conquest of Chapei for four days.’35
Apart from the streets of the foreign concessions, the only safe place for refugees was the ‘Jacquinot Zone’, a patch of ground between Frenchtown and Nantao, which the Japanese and Chinese armies promised to respect. It was named in honour of Father Jacquinot de Besange, a one-armed Jesuit priest who worked tirelessly to feed and clothe thousands of Chinese families who packed into the safety zone’s makeshift shelters.36
Shanghai Fury Page 34