Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2013 by
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Harmsen
ISBN 978-1-61200-167-8
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Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 THREE CORPSES
CHAPTER 2 “BLACK SATURDAY”
CHAPTER 3 FLESH AGAINST STEEL
CHAPTER 4 “BANZAI! BANZAI! BANZAI!”
CHAPTER 5 RIVERS OF BLOOD
CHAPTER 6 VERDUN OF THE EAST
CHAPTER 7 THE “LOST BATTALION”
CHAPTER 8 COLLAPSE
CHAPTER 9 AFTERMATH
ORDER OF BATTLE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Acknowledgments
NO ENDEAVOR IS A ONE-MAN UNDERTAKING. THIS ALSO GOES FOR Shanghai 1937. The information needed to tell the untold story of the great battle on the banks of the Yangtze had to come from numerous sources, some less obvious than others. I have depended on the help of acquaintances, and the occasional kindness of strangers, without whom this book would never have made it into print.
I wish to acknowledge the following institutions for their generous assistance: Academia Historica, Taipei; the National Central Library, Taipei; the Department Military Archives, Freiburg im Breisgau; and Columbia Center for Oral History. The willingness of the Asahi Shimbun Photo Archives and of the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, to share their rich and unique holdings of historical images was essential in putting together a pictorial record of the momentous events described in this book.
Among individuals who have contributed, I would particularly like to mention Kashiwagi Kazuhiko, editor at Asahi Shimbun Photo Archives, and Fang Jun, a Beijing-based amateur historian who shows by his own personal example that the memory of the Sino-Japanese War is very much alive in China today. Thanks should also go to my colleague Sam Yeh in the Taipei office of the French news agency AFP for his help in giving this book an Internet presence.
I am extremely grateful for the help provided by the staff at Casemate Publishers, including editorial director Steven Smith, for his enthusiastic support during the entire process of preparing this publication; designer Libby Braden for ensuring that the book ended up as visually appealing as it did; and editor Anita Baker for polishing the manuscript with a keen eye for both the big picture and the small, but important, detail.
The patience of my wife Hui-tsung was crucial. Finally, thanks to my children, Eva and Lisa, for putting up with all the evenings and weekends Dad had to spend in front of the computer.
TAIPEI, FEBRUARY 2013
Prologue
IN THE EARLY PART OF 1937, THE CONCEPT OF URBAN WARFARE WAS still new to the world. Three months of battle in Shanghai in the fall of that year changed all that. The struggle between China and Japan demonstrated what happens to a major city when it becomes the arena for two vast armies, fielding hundreds of thousands of men and an array of destructive weapons. There had been other instances of war in an urban setting—indeed, earlier in the decade Shanghai was an example of that—but never on such a massive scale. The scenes of flattened housing complexes and gutted factories that were later to captivate and horrify the global public during the battle of Stalingrad had in fact already been played out more than five years earlier in China’s largest city.
In a sense, the struggle for Shanghai in 1937 was a dress rehearsal for World War II. Or more correctly, perhaps, it was part of World War II. Arguably, it could be considered to be the first major battle in a conflict that divided mankind into two major camps—one consisting of Fascist regimes in various guises, the other a motley group of democratic and totalitarian nations. To westerners it is natural to see World War II as starting in earnest with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. For Asians, it is just as logical to think of it as beginning two years earlier on the north Chinese plain and along the banks of the Yangtze.
Even if the battle of Shanghai is considered isolated from the larger context of World War II, it was undeniably an event that would leave an indelible mark on the two ancient civilizations caught up in it. It was the biggest clash between nations that East Asia had seen since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905.1 It turned localized, and possibly manageable, Sino-Japanese friction into a full-scale war that would continue for eight bloody years. In fact neither side, Chinese or Japanese, has ever really found closure, and to this day, nearly 80 years later, they remain locked in mutual suspicion. Much of this is due to the appalling brutality exhibited by the Japanese Army in China, which was epitomized in the infamous Rape of Nanjing—a direct result of the Shanghai campaign.
Shanghai was Asia’s most cosmopolitan city and home to citizens from a range of nations, as well as a large number of stateless people. Although they lived in areas left mostly untouched by combat, they were often just yards away from scenes of carnage where men and women fought and died in their thousands. These foreign inhabitants became the unwilling witnesses of the battle that raged all around them, and in that way they helped write history themselves. Rarely before had so many civilians seen so much bloodshed at such close range. The analogy would have been if a district of Stalingrad had miraculously been left unharmed by the battle, allowing the residents to take in all of the fighting that devoured the rest of the city. Or, in the words of American correspondent Edgar Snow: “It was as though Verdun had happened on the Seine, in full view of a Right Bank Paris that was neutral; as though a Gettysburg were fought in Harlem, while the rest of Manhattan remained a non-belligerent observer.”2
Verdun and Gettysburg are apt comparisons. These battles had been momentous events, and the battle that consumed the Yangtze River delta in the latter half of 1937 was, too. The rest of the world understood this and the fighting regularly occupied the front pages of major newspapers around the globe. Shanghai seized the imagination then for much the same reasons as it does so again today. It was a place of excitement and exotic adventure, and the public wanted to be informed when its fate was hanging in the balance.
Therefore, it is ironic that so little has been written in any language other than Chinese about the battle of Shanghai in past decades. Not a single monograph on this crucial encounter is listed among the hundreds of thousands of volumes dealing with World War II and its antecedents. In a time when academic and popular writers must use all their imaginative powers to think up uncovered angles on the war in Europe and the Pacific, the battle of Shanghai and many other battles of the
1937—1945 Sino-Japanese War constitute a gaping hole in the historiography. It is my hope that this book can make a modest contribution towards rectifying this imbalance.
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In what follows, almost all Chinese names are spelled using the pinyin system of transliteration introduced in China after 1949 and now increasingly adopted elsewhere. Traditional spelling has only been kept in a few instances where the use of pinyin would confuse rather than enlighten. China’s supreme leader is referred to as Chiang Kai-shek rather than Jiang Jieshi. In addition, in bibliographical references, authors’ spellings of their own names are maintained, even if they do not follow the conventions for the use of pinyin, for example, Hsin Ta-mo instead of Xin Damo.
Geographical names are generally given in their modern rendering rather than the way they were described in 1937, e.g. Beijing instead of Beiping and Taiwan instead of Formosa. Here, too, exceptions have been allowed for the sake of clarity. Manchukuo is not spelled Manzhouguo, and Marco Polo Bridge is not called Lugou Bridge.
It is generally the custom to give the full names of Chinese persons in the first reference, and later refer to them by their family names only. I have frequently departed from this convention so that it is possible to make the necessary distinctions between people with the same family names, e.g. Zhang Zhizhong and Zhang Fakui, who were both pivotal commanders. My aim is also to make it easier for the reader to commit the often unfamiliar names to memory. For Japanese persons, family names are put before given names.
CHAPTER
1
Three Corpses
JULY 7—AUGUST 12
THE BULLET-RIDDLED SEDAN HAD SCREECHED TO AN ABRUPT HALT at the entrance of the airfield. Nearby, the two men who had been inside lay sprawled on the ground. Their blood-soaked uniforms identified them as members of the Japanese Navy’s elite Special Landing Force. The brains splashed across the dashboard showed that one of them had died inside the car. He had then been dragged out to be slashed, kicked and pounded into a pulp. Half his face was missing and his stomach had been cut open, the sickly pallor of his intestines gleaming faintly in the night. The other man had escaped the vehicle but had only managed a few paces before being gunned down. A little distance away lay a third body, dressed in a Chinese uniform.1
It was several hours before dawn on Tuesday, August 10, 1937. Darkness still engulfed Hongqiao Aerodrome eight miles west of Shanghai, and the investigators had to work under automobile headlights and using electric torches. They were a diverse group. There were Chinese, of course, but there were also Japanese, British, French and American detectives—representatives of foreign powers that felt quite at home in China’s largest and most prosperous city after nearly a century there. Also present was a group of reporters from the cutthroat world of Shanghai’s English-and Chinese-language press. Despite the antisocial hour, they had to be here. This could be big, very big.
The investigators quickly determined that the badly mangled body belonged to 27-year-old Sub-Lieutenant Oyama Isao, while the other dead Japanese was his driver, First Class Seaman Saito Yozo. The identity of the Chinese fatality was a mystery. The scene looked like the result of a simple shoot-out. However, too many questions remained unanswered: What were the Japanese doing at a military airfield miles away from their barracks? Who had opened fire first and why had he decided to shoot? The Chinese investigators and their Japanese counterparts didn’t see eye to eye on the answers to any of these questions. As they paced up and down the scene of the incident, scouring the ground for evidence, loud arguments erupted again and again. Shortly before sunrise, they wound up their work having reached no agreement on what had actually happened. They got into their cars and headed back to the city.
The acrimony that the Chinese and the Japanese detectives displayed towards each other surprised no one. Tensions between the two nations had risen dramatically over the preceding five weeks, in Shanghai and beyond. These tensions were the result of distant events as hundreds of miles to the north an undeclared war was raging. It had started in early July, when a series of misunderstandings had caused Japanese and Chinese soldiers to clash near Beijing in a hectic night of confused skirmishing. Very soon events had taken on a seemingly unstoppable momentum of their own, as more and more areas around the old imperial capital were sucked into a conflict that still had no name. So far Shanghai, in the middle of China’s economic heartland, had successfully avoided any hostilities, but everyone knew that the peace might not last.
China’s future was uncertain. What were the intentions of the Chinese government in Nanjing, the Yangtze River city from which it had ruled the vast country for the past decade? What plans were being prepared by military and political decision makers in Tokyo? Would the Beijing turmoil expand into a general war engulfing all of China? The answers to these questions would also affect thousands of Japanese—soldiers, diplomats and businessmen—who were residing in Shanghai and other large cities along the Yangtze River. They knew that if war were to break out there, deep inside what would then be enemy territory, they would all be in great danger, surrounded by millions of hostile Chinese. In the present circumstances, all that was needed was a single spark. The incident at the aerodrome might be just that spark.
The investigators were keenly aware of the consequences if they failed to handle their delicate task with the necessary finesse. But even if they were hoping for peace, it was clear that Shanghai was a city preparing for war. As they drove through the still dark suburbs on their way from Hongqiao back to their downtown offices, their car headlights fell on whitewashed trees, interspersed with sandbag positions and the silhouettes of lone Chinese sentries. Officially, these sentries were members of the Peace Preservation Corps, a paramilitary outfit that, due to an international agreement brokered a few years earlier, was the only Chinese force allowed to stay in the Shanghai area. However, rumors were circulating that they were in fact disguised members of the 88th Division, one of the best-trained units of the entire Chinese Army.
Having entered the city, the vehicles passed first the French Concession and then the International Settlement, both parts of Shanghai where foreigners lived in comfortable isolation away from the din and dirt of the Chinese neighborhoods. Some districts were indistinguishable from London, Paris or Boston. The maple-lined streets housed businesses with names such as Ambassador Cinema, Vienna Ballroom and Café Bonheur. Surroundings such as these seemed almost designed to give a false sense of security. This was not Europe or America, but very much Asia. The deceptively peaceful veneer could dissolve any time and unveil an uglier and much more violent reality underneath, as had happened only too recently.
The incident took place in Zhabei, a rough working-class neighborhood not far north of the Art Deco facades of the International Settlement. Since the start of the boom years early in the century, Zhabei had attracted tens of thousands of migrants from the countryside with its promise of work, food and shelter. This had led to overcrowding with many people living in too little space, and Zhabei had become a leprosy-ridden slum area normally shunned by Shanghai’s expatriates. They could mostly afford to pretend it did not even exist. Mostly, but not always. Five years earlier Zhabei had been the scene of fierce, house-to-house fighting between Chinese and Japanese soldiers who had been killing each other with gusto in a brief unofficial war. For five weeks in early 1932, the constant, unsettling sound of battle had been carried by the wind into the International Settlement, while swarms of refugees had tried desperately, and mostly in vain, to gain entry into the safety of the foreign quarters.
In the end, the Japanese had scored a Pyrrhic victory, while China, despite its defeat, had arguably gained more. It had won confidence. After nearly a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialists, it now knew that it could strike back and hit hard, even at the most aggressive and merciless of all the hated colonial powers that were encroaching on its territory. Important as it was, this was not the only lesson that China dre
w from the 1932 war. It was abundantly clear that any new conflict with Japan was likely to be costly. Even five years after the fighting, despite years of busy reconstruction efforts, Zhabei still carried the physical scars of that short, sharp flash of violence. With the threat of conflict now in the air again, the stakes were, therefore, high as the investigators returned to their offices while the day dawned over Shanghai. Mismanage this crisis, and there was no telling what bloodshed might ensue and at what cost to millions of innocent civilians.
In the hours that followed, both sides released their respective versions of the events. According to the Chinese, the Japanese vehicle had tried to force its way through the gate of the airport. When Peace Preservation Corps members posted at the entrance had motioned to Saito, the driver, to stop, he had abruptly turned the car around, while Sub-Lieutenant Oyama had shot at the Chinese guards with an automatic pistol. Only then had the Chinese opened fire, killing Oyama in a hail of bullets. Saito had managed to jump out before he, too, had been gunned down. It was not the first time someone Japanese had tried to enter the airport, the commander of the Chinese guards told a western reporter. It had happened repeatedly in the past two months, and they “obviously were undertaking espionage.”2
The Japanese account, unsurprisingly, blamed the entire incident on China. It stated that Oyama had been riding along a road skirting the airfield, with no intention of entering. Suddenly, the vehicle had been stopped and surrounded by Peace Preservation Corps troops who, without warning, had opened up a barrage of rifle and machine gun fire. Oyama had not had the slightest chance to shoot back. The two Japanese had every right to drive on the road, the property of the International Settlement, a Japanese statement argued, before labeling the incident as a clear violation of the 1932 peace agreement. “We demand that the Chinese bear responsibility for this illegal act,” the statement concluded.3
Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze Page 1