Chinese soldiers wore rounded peaked caps with ear flaps tied over the top. They had no steel helmets, except those they took from dead Japanese soldiers and wore with pride. Many also wore tunics taken from enemy soldiers, which became confusing at times of crisis. The most prized trophy was a Japanese pistol. In fact it was often easier for Chinese soldiers to get more ammunition for captured Japanese weapons than for their issued rifles, which came from a wide variety of countries and manufacturers. Their greatest deficiencies were in medical services, artillery and aircraft.
In and out of battle, Chinese troops were directed by bugle calls. Wireless communications existed only between major headquarters, and even they were unreliable. The Japanese were also able to break their codes with ease and thus knew their dispositions and intentions. Chinese military transport consisted of some trucks, but most units in the field relied on mules beaten on with traditional curses, Mongolian ponies and bullock-drawn carts with solid wooden wheels. There were never enough and this meant that soldiers often received no food. And since their pay was almost always months in arrears, and sometimes embezzled by their officers, morale suffered badly. But there can be no doubt about the bravery and determination of Chinese troops in the Battle of Shanghai that summer.
The origins and motives which led to this great clash are still debated. The classic explanation is that Chiang, by opening up a new front at Shanghai while continuing to fight in the north and centre, wanted to split Japanese forces to prevent their concentration for a quick victory. This would be his war of attrition, as advised by General von Falkenhausen. An attack on Shanghai would also force the Communists and other allied armies to commit themselves to the War of Resistance, even if there was always the danger that they would withdraw rather than risk their forces and power base. It also ensured a declaration of Soviet support, with the despatch of military advisers, and the supply of fighters, tanks, artillery, machine guns and vehicles. This would be paid for with raw materials exported to the Soviet Union.
The other explanation is certainly compelling. Stalin, deeply alarmed by Japanese successes in northern China, was the one who really wanted to move the fighting down to the south and away from his far eastern borders. This he was able to do through the regional Nationalist commander General Chang Ching-chong, who was secretly a Soviet ‘sleeper’. On several occasions Chang tried to persuade the generalissimo to launch a pre-emptive strike on the Japanese garrison of 3,000 marines in Shanghai. Chiang told him to make no move without specific orders. An attack on Shanghai also carried huge risks. It was only 290 kilometres from Nanking, and defeat there close to the mouth of the Yangtze might lead to a rapid Japanese advance on the capital and into the centre of China. On 9 August, Chang sent a picked group of soldiers to Shanghai airfield, where they shot down a Japanese marine lieutenant and a soldier with him. On Chang’s own account, they then shot a Chinese prisoner condemned to death to pretend that the Japanese had fired first. The Japanese, also reluctant to start a battle round Shanghai, did not at first react, except to call for reinforcements. Chiang again told Chang not to attack. On 13 August, Japanese warships began to bombard the Chinese quarters of Shanghai. Next morning, two Nationalist divisions began their assault on the city. An air attack was also launched against the flagship of the Japanese Third Fleet, the old cruiser Izumo anchored off the Bund in the centre of the city. It was an inauspicious start. The warship’s fire drove off the obsolete aircraft. Some rounds hit the bomb racks of one of them, and as it flew over the international settlement its load dropped on the Palace Hotel, on Nanking Road and on other places crowded with refugees. Some 1,300 civilians were thus killed or injured by their own plane.
Forces on both sides began to build up in a rapid escalation which turned the battle into the largest engagement of the Sino-Japanese War. On 23 August the Japanese, having reinforced their troops in Shanghai, made landings on the coast to the north to outflank Nationalist positions. Their armoured landing craft put tanks ashore, and Japanese naval gunfire was all the more effective when Nationalist divisions had almost no artillery. Nationalist attempts to blockade the Yangtze also failed and their tiny air force stood little chance against Japanese air supremacy.
From 11 September, Nationalist forces directed by Falkenhausen fought with great bravery despite terrible losses. Most divisions, especially Chiang’s elite formations, lost more than half their strength, including 10,000 junior officers. Chiang, unable to make up his mind whether to fight on or withdraw, then sent in even more divisions. He hoped to draw international attention to China’s fight, just before a meeting of the League of Nations.
Altogether, the Japanese fielded nearly 200,000 men on the Shanghai front, more than they deployed in northern China. In the third week of September they began to achieve breaches in the Nationalist defences, forcing them in October to retreat to the line of the Soochow Creek, an effective water obstacle despite its name. One battalion was left behind to defend a godown or warehouse, to give the impression that the Nationalists still had a foothold in Shanghai. This ‘lone battalion’ became a great propaganda myth for the Chinese cause.
At the beginning of November, after more desperate fighting, the Japanese crossed the Soochow Creek using small metal assault boats and established bridgeheads in several places. Then, with another amphibious landing on the coast to the south, they forced the Nationalists to retreat. Discipline and morale, which had held up well during the savage fighting and heavy losses, now collapsed. Soldiers threw away their rifles, and refugees were trampled underfoot in the panic caused by Japanese bombers and fighters. During the three months of fighting round Shanghai, the Japanese had suffered more than 40,000 casualties. The Chinese figure was just over 187,000, at least four and a half times more.
In a headlong advance, torching villages along the way, Japanese divisions raced each other towards Nanking. The Imperial Japanese Navy sent minesweepers and gunboats up the Yangtze to bombard the city. The Nationalist government began to depart up the Yangtze mainly by river steamer and junk for Hankow, which was to be the temporary capital. Chungking on the upper Yangtze in Szechuan would take over the role later.
Chiang Kai-shek could not decide whether to defend Nanking or abandon it without a fight. The city was indefensible, and yet to abandon such an important symbol would be a humiliation. His generals could not agree. In the event the worst of both worlds was achieved, with an incomplete defence which simply angered the attackers. Japanese commanders were in fact planning to use mustard gas and incendiaries on the capital if the fighting was likely to approach the intensity of what they had experienced at Shanghai.
The Chinese certainly had an idea of their enemy’s ruthlessness, but even they could not imagine the degree of cruelty to come. On 13 December, Chinese forces evacuated Nanking, only to be trapped outside in a sudden encirclement. Japanese troops entered the city with orders to kill all prisoners. A single unit in the 16th Division killed 15,000 Chinese prisoners, and just one company slaughtered 1,300. A German diplomat reported to Berlin that ‘besides mass executions by machinegun fire, other more individual methods of killing were employed as well, such as pouring gasoline over a victim and setting him afire’. Buildings in the city were looted and set alight. To escape the murder, rape and destruction civilians tried to shelter in the designated ‘international safety zone’.
The furia japonica shocked the world with its appalling massacres and mass rapes in revenge for the bitter fighting at Shanghai, which the Japanese army had never expected from the Chinese they despised. Accounts of civilian casualties vary widely. Some Chinese sources put them as high as 300,000, but a more likely figure is closer to 200,000. The Japanese military authorities, in a series of inept lies, claimed that they were killing only Chinese soldiers who had put on civilian clothes and that the death toll was little more than a thousand. The scenes of massacre were hellish, with corpses rotting on every street and in every open space, many of them chewed by semi-feral dogs. Ev
ery pond, stream and river was polluted with decomposing bodies.
Japanese soldiers had been brought up in a militaristic society. The whole village or neighbourhood, paying homage to these martial values, would usually turn out to bid farewell to a conscript departing to join the army. Soldiers thus tended to fight for the honour of their family and local community, not for the emperor as westerners tended to believe. Basic training was designed to destroy their individuality. Recruits were constantly insulted and beaten by their NCOs to toughen them up and to provoke them, in what might be called the knock-on theory of oppression, to take their anger out in turn on the soldiers and civilians of a defeated enemy. All of them had also been indoctrinated since elementary school to believe that the Chinese were totally inferior to the ‘divine race’ of Japanese and were ‘below pigs’. In a typical case-history of post-war confessions, one soldier admitted that although he had been horrified by the gratuitous torture of a Chinese prisoner, he had asked to be allowed to take over to make up for a perceived insult.
At Nanking, wounded Chinese soldiers were bayoneted where they lay. Officers made prisoners kneel in rows, then practised beheading them one by one with their samurai swords. Their soldiers were also ordered to carry out bayonet practice on thousands of Chinese prisoners bound or tied to trees. Any who refused were beaten severely by their NCOs. The Imperial Japanese Army’s process of dehumanizing its troops was stepped up as soon as they arrived in China from the home islands. A Corporal Nakamura, who had himself been conscripted as a soldier against his will, described in his diary how he and his comrades made some new Japanese recruits watch as they tortured five Chinese civilians to death. The newcomers were horrified, but Nakamura wrote: ‘All new recruits are like this, but soon they will be doing the same things themselves.’ Shimada Toshio, a private second class, recounted his ‘baptism of blood’ on reaching the 226th Regiment in China later. A Chinese prisoner had been tied by his hands and ankles to a pole on each side of him. Nearly fifty new recruits were lined up to bayonet him. ‘My emotion must have been paralyzed. I felt no mercy on him. He eventually started asking us, “Come on. Hurry up!” We couldn’t stick the right spot. So he said “Hurry up!” which meant that he wanted to die quickly.’ Shimada claimed that it was difficult because the bayonet stuck in him ‘like [in] tofu’.
John Rabe, a German businessman from Siemens, who organized the international safety zone in Nanking and showed both courage and humanity, wrote in his diary: ‘I am totally puzzled by the conduct of the Japanese. On the one hand, they want to be recognized and treated as a great power on a par with European powers, on the other, they are currently displaying a crudity, brutality and bestiality that bears no comparison except with the hordes of Genghis Khan.’ Twelve days later he wrote: ‘You can’t breathe for sheer revulsion when you keep finding the bodies of women with bamboo poles thrust up their vaginas. Even old women over 70 are constantly being raped.’
The group ethos of the Imperial Japanese Army, instilled by collective punishment in training, also produced a pecking order between experienced troops and newcomers. Senior soldiers organized the gang-rapes, with up to thirty men per woman, whom they usually killed when they had finished with her. Recently arrived soldiers were not permitted to take part. Only when they had been accepted as part of the group would they be ‘invited’ to join in.
New soldiers were also not permitted to visit ‘comfort women’ in the military brothels. These were girls and young married women, seized off the street or designated by village headmen under orders from the feared Kempeitai military police to provide a fixed quota. Following the Nanking massacre and rape, the Japanese military authorities demanded another 3,000 women ‘for the use of the army’. More than 2,000 had already been seized from the city of Soochow alone after its capture in November. As well as local women carried off against their will, the Japanese imported large numbers of young women from their colony of Korea. A battalion commander in the 37th Division even took three Chinese women slaves along with his headquarters for his personal use. To make them look like men, their heads were shaved in an attempt to disguise their role.
The idea of the military authorities was to reduce cases of venereal disease and to restrict the number of rapes publicly carried out by their own men which might provoke the population into resistance. They preferred that women slaves should be raped perpetually in the secrecy of ‘comfort houses’. But the notion that the provision of comfort women would somehow stop Japanese soldiers from raping at will proved to be utterly false. Soldiers clearly preferred random acts of rape to queueing up at the comfort house, and their officers felt that rape contributed to their martial spirit.
On the rare occasions that the Japanese were forced to abandon a town, they would slaughter the comfort women out of anti-Chinese vengeance. For example, when the town of Suencheng not far from Nanking was temporarily retaken, Chinese troops entered ‘a building in which the nude bodies of a dozen Chinese civilian women had been found after the Japanese were driven out. The sign on the door-frame facing the street still read: “Consolation [Comfort] House of the Great Imperial Army”.’
In northern China, the Japanese experienced some setbacks almost entirely at the hands of Nationalist troops. Communist forces from the Eighth Route Army, who claimed to be able to march more than a hundred kilometres in a day, were kept out of the worst of the fighting on Mao’s strict orders. But by the end of the year the Kwantung Army controlled the towns of Chahar and Suiyuan provinces and the northern part of Shansi. South of Peking they seized the province of Shantung and its capital with ease, largely due to the cowardice of the regional commander, General Han Fu-chu.
General Han, who had fled in an aeroplane, taking with him the contents of the local treasury and a silver coffin, was arrested by the Nationalists and sentenced to death. He was made to kneel and then a fellow general shot him through the head. This warning to commanders was widely acclaimed by all parties and contributed greatly to Chinese unity. The Japanese were increasingly dismayed to find how determined the Chinese were to fight on, even after losing their capital and almost all their air force. And they were exasperated by the way the Chinese managed, after the Battle of Shanghai, to avoid the sort of decisive engagement which would destroy them.
In January 1938, the Japanese began to advance north up the railway line from Nanking towards Suchow, a major communications centre and of great strategic value since it was linked to a port on the east coast and lay astride the railway line to the west. If Suchow fell, then the great industrial agglomeration of Wuchang and Hankow (today’s Wuhan) would be vulnerable. As in the Russian Civil War, railway lines in China were of immense importance for the movement and supply of armies. Chiang Kaishek, who had long known that Suchow would represent a key objective in a Japanese invasion, assembled some 400,000 troops in the region, a mixture of Nationalist divisions and those of warlord allies.
The generalissimo was well aware of the importance of the coming battles. The conflict in China had attracted many foreign journalists and was seen as a counterpart to the Spanish Civil War. Some of the same writers, photographers and film-makers who had been in Spain–Robert Capa, Joris Ivens, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood–arrived to witness and record Chinese resistance to the Japanese onslaught. The forthcoming defence of Wuchang was compared to the Republican defence of Madrid against Franco’s Army of Africa in the autumn of 1936. Doctors who had treated Spanish Republican wounded soon began to arrive to help Nationalist and Communist forces in China. The most notable was the Canadian surgeon Dr Norman Bethune, who died in China from blood poisoning.
Stalin also saw certain parallels with the Spanish Civil War, but Chiang was misled by his representative in Moscow, who was far too optimistic in his belief that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan. While the fighting continued, Chiang opened indirect negotiations with the Japanese through the German ambassador partly in a bid to force Stalin’s hand, but their terms we
re too harsh. Stalin, presumably well briefed by one of his agents, knew that the Nationalists could not possibly accept them.
In February, Japanese divisions of the 2nd Army coming from the north crossed the Yellow River to encircle the Chinese formations. By the end of March, the Japanese had entered the city of Suchow, where furious fighting continued for several days. The Chinese had few weapons to deal with Japanese tanks, but Soviet armament had begun to arrive, and counterattacks were made sixty kilometres to the east at Taierchuang, where the Nationalists claimed a great victory. The Japanese rushed in reinforcements from Japan and Manchuria. On 17 May, they believed that they had trapped the bulk of the Chinese divisions, but, splitting into small groups, 200,000 Nationalist troops escaped the encirclement. Suchow was finally lost on 21 May and 30,000 prisoners taken.
In July, the first major border clash between the Japanese and the Red Army took place at Lake Khasan. Again the Nationalists hoped that the Soviet Union would enter the war, but their expectations were dashed. Stalin even tacitly recognized Japanese control of Manchuria. With Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia, he was deeply concerned about the German threat in the west. But Stalin did begin to send military advisers to the Nationalists. The first had arrived in June, just before the departure of General von Falkenhausen and his team, who had been ordered back to Germany by Göring.
The Japanese then planned to attack Wuchang and Hankow, as Chiang had feared. They also decided to set up their own Chinese puppet government. To slow the enemy advance, Chiang Kai-shek gave orders for the Yellow River dikes to be breached, or, in the words of the high command decision, to ‘use water as a substitute for soldiers’. This drowned-earth policy delayed the Japanese by about five months, but the destruction and civilian deaths that it caused over 70,000 square kilometres were horrific. There was no high ground on which people could seek shelter. The official death toll from drowning, starvation and illness reached 800,000, while more than six million people became refugees.
The Second World War Page 9