Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

by Harmsen, Peter

  Huang was by no means an exceptional case. Chinese officers died in large numbers from day one. One regiment lost seven company commanders in the same short attack.24 There were several explanations for the high incidence of death among the senior ranks. One was an ethos among some officers to lead from the front in an attempt to instill courage into their men. However, even leading from the rear could be highly risky in urban combat, where the opposing sides were often just yards removed from each other and where the maze-like surroundings provided by multi-story buildings and narrow alleys could lead to a highly fluid situation, so that the enemy was just as likely to be behind as in front. In addition, soldiers on both sides deliberately targeted enemy officers, perhaps more so than in other conflicts, because stiff leadership hierarchies placed a premium on being able to decapitate the opposing unit.

  First and foremost, however, the massive fatality rates among officers and, to an even larger extent, the rank and file were the result of Chinese forces employing frontal attacks against a well-armed entrenched enemy. The men who, as a result, were dying by the hundreds were China’s elite soldiers, the product of years of effort to build up a modern military. They formed the nation’s best hope of being able to resist Japan in a protracted war. Nevertheless, on the very first day of battle, they were being squandered at an alarming, unsustainable rate. After just a few hours of offensive operations with very little gain to show for them, Chiang Kai-shek decided to cut his losses. “Do not carry out attacks this evening,” he commanded Zhang Zhizhong in a telegram. “Await further orders.”25

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  In the weeks preceding the outbreak of war in Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek had received a parade of leaders from the provinces who were anxious to join in the upcoming fight. After years of civil strife a new sense of unity was tying them together for the first time. “Lead us against the Japanese, and we pledge our troops and loyalty for the duration of the war,” was the message they all conveyed.26 As a sign of his sincerity to the provincials, Chiang decided to appoint one of his longest-standing rivals—a man who years earlier would happily have seen him killed—to the position of overall commander in the Shanghai area.

  His name was Feng Yuxiang, but to foreigners, he was better known as the Christian General. He had risen to prominence as a warlord in China’s tumultuous north and become famous for his missionary zeal after converting to Christianity. He was reported to have carried out mass baptisms of his soldiers with fire hoses and ordered them to march to the tunes of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”27 This was all very well for Chiang Kai-shek, himself a converted Christian, but he was more concerned about the 54-year-old Feng Yuxiang’s advocacy of a lenient line towards the Com-munists. Besides, he could hardly forget that Feng Yuxiang had participated in an open rebellion against his rule early in the decade. Even so, he was prepared to shelve these differences for the time being.

  Tall and bulky and perennially cheerful, Feng Yuxiang did not hesitate when offered the command. “As long as it serves the purpose of fighting Japan,” Feng told Chiang, “I’ll say yes, no matter what it is.” His appointment was announced as the first shots were fired in Shanghai.28 Feng was about a decade older than his direct subordinates, which was an advantage, Chiang thought. He wanted someone possessed and prudent who could counterbalance the fiery tempers at the next level down the chain of command. “The frontline commanders are too young. They’ve got a lot of courage, but they lack experience,” Chiang said.29

  Feng moved his command post to a temple outside Suzhou in the middle of August. Almost immediately afterwards, he went to see Zhang Zhizhong, who had set up his command right by the Suzhou city wall. At that time, Zhang had just begun to realize how tough the Japanese resistance in Shanghai really was. His staff was beginning to pick up disconcerting signs of his illness, sensing that sickness and exhaustion meant he was physically struggling to stay upright and lead the battle.30 Perhaps a feeling of being overwhelmed was why he failed to undertake basic tasks such as providing adequate protection from air attack.

  Feng, by contrast, had an infantryman’s healthy respect of aircraft and had noticed how his own motorcade had seemed to attract the attention of enemy airplanes. “You better move,” he told Zhang Zhizhong’s chief of staff. “Otherwise you’ll get bombed.” Shortly after his visit, Feng left for Shanghai in a car. He had not even got two miles before a swarm of Japanese planes appeared over his head, flying in the direction of Suzhou. Seconds later he saw clouds rise over Zhang Zhizhong’s command post. Zhang survived the bombing, but he had received a lesson. “The Japanese knew right from the start where Zhang’s headquarters was,” Feng said.31

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  For Sascha Spunt, the scion of the wealthy cotton-trading merchant dynasty, Friday, August 13 was an exciting day, but it had nothing to do with the war. He was getting married. After a civil ceremony at the French Consulate, the family had an informal luncheon at their luxurious home near the Bund. When a friend of the family was about to raise his glass for a toast, he was interrupted by the muffled boom of guns in the distance, then the sharper sound of the naval artillery just outside on the river. “Nobody can say this wedding isn’t getting started with a bang,” the friend said.32

  Expatriates picnicking in the Yangshupu area when the fighting started greeted the new turn of events with similar sangfroid. They were spectators and saw the fighting with the amused aloofness of onlookers forced to witness a drunken bar brawl. As shells from the naval artillery started flying over their heads, they agreed the time had come to withdraw south to the International Settlement. However, their mood remained excellent. It was the kind of adventure that had brought the thrill-seekers to Asia in the first place. One of them called it “the most exciting three hours since my own war days.”33

  Just north of Suzhou Creek, a group of political scientists from American universities were watching the evolving battle from the roof of their hotel, the Astor House. They were on a study tour of Asia and had avoided Beijing because of the fighting there. Now they found themselves in the middle of the action, noticing how the fires in Zhabei colored the sky an unnatural, but strangely beautiful, hue of red. They were due to leave on a ship for Japan on Sunday, two days later, but had started wondering if the rapidly evolving events might upset their plans. “We were a little concerned, but not seriously concerned at that point,” said William Verhage, a 37-year-old professor from Minnesota State Teachers College.34

  For the foreigners of Shanghai, visitors and residents alike, the war was a rather violent diversion, but nothing truly dangerous, or so they thought. For the Chinese, life was falling apart. As the fighting intensified around the Japanese district, thousands of refugees fled through the streets, heading for Suzhou Creek and the Garden Bridge, which was the only link to the International Settlement that remained open. It was a mad and merciless stampede where the weak had little chance. “My feet were slipping . . . in blood and flesh,” recalled Rhodes Farmer, a journalist for the North China Daily News, who found himself in a sea of people struggling to leave Hongkou. “Half a dozen times I knew I was walking on the bodies of children or old people sucked under by the torrent, trampled flat by countless feet.”

  Near the creek, the mass of sweating and panting humanity was almost beyond control, as it funneled towards the bridge, which was a mere 55 feet wide. Two Japanese sentries were nearly overwhelmed by the crowds and reacted the way they had been taught—with immediate, reflexive brutality. One of them bayoneted an old man and threw the lifeless body into the filthy creek below. This did not deter any of the other refugees, who kept pushing towards the bridge and what they believed to be the safety of the International Settlement.35 They could not know it, but they were moving in the wrong direction, towards the most horrific slaughter of innocent civilians of the entire Shanghai campaign.

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  A typhoon swept over Shanghai on Saturday, August 14. It was terrible we
ather for flying, but the Chinese Air Force nevertheless sent off its young pilots, 40 altogether, none of whom had been tried in battle. The lack of coordination between Chinese army and air force officers caused the attacks to have only marginal tactical value for the troops on the ground. While a few planes bombed the marine headquarters at Hongkou Park, causing no losses whatsoever to the Japanese soldiers holed up inside,36 most targeted the Japanese vessels in the Huangpu River, and especially the flagship, the Izumo.

  A total of six sorties took place over Shanghai during the day, concentrated in the morning and the late afternoon, with a long uneventful lull in between.37 The same scene was played out in each raid. Chinese aircraft would appear over the dark gray horizon and follow the Huangpu River north towards the Japanese fleet, which was anchored near Huangpu’s confluence with Suzhou Creek in a spot easily recognizable from the air. The Japanese vessels in turn would let loose their cannon and fill the air with a dense carpet of exploding shells, never allowing the planes to come close enough to drop their bombs with any degree of precision. “It was their first taste of Archie,” said a foreign spectator, who had been an aviator in the Great War, using pilot slang for anti-aircraft artillery. “When the shells began to burst round them they got the wind up and dropped their eggs as quickly as possible.”38

  The results were predictable. Most of the bombs landed in the Huangpu, causing slender white geysers to rise towards the sky, seeming to almost freeze before collapsing back into the river and sending yellow tidal waves rolling towards the Bund. One stray bomb landed on land, hitting a Standard Oil gas tank, which exploded in a sea of flames. The pilots did score one hit against a Japanese target. A shell exploded a little further down the river near the cable-laying vessel Okinawa Maru, whose crew was repairing an underwater telegraph line, sending shrapnel whistling across the deck and killing one sailor. However, the Izumo itself remained stoically in front of the Japanese Consulate, leading some to start mumbling that the old vessel must have a charmed life.

  Despite the lack of success, spectators on the ground watched the show with intense interest. Some were refugees from the battlefields in the north of the city, while others were simply taking advantage of their day off to suck in a bit of real-life drama. Just south of Suzhou Creek, the roof of the Mission Building, where Rev. Rawlinson had spent the morning busy at work, was filled with more than a hundred onlookers, until C. L. Boynton, an official of the National Church Council, ordered them down. “I bought a good padlock and locked them off the roof,” he wrote.39 Elsewhere, there was no one to warn the crowd of the dangers, and the corner of the Bund and Nanjing Road, which offered a direct view of the Izumo, had attracted thousands.

  Shortly after 4:00 p.m. yet another Chinese raid took place. The sortie consisted of ten aircraft, which, like all the others before them, dispersed as soon as the anti-aircraft guns began barking. The six planes in front vanished into the clouds, but the four in the rear maintained their formation. One of them suddenly veered off course, and moments later four bombs fell from its belly. Two broke through the surface of the Huangpu, but the other two were caught by the heavy typhoon wind and carried towards the riverbank. Thousands stared helplessly as the bombs, already put on their set course by fate, steered relentlessly for the tightly packed space at the eastern end of Nanjing Road.40

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  William Verhage, the young professor from Minnesota, watched the two bombs approach from a balcony on the fifth floor of the Palace Hotel, near the corner of Nanjing Road and the Bund. The members of his tour group had moved there from Astor House earlier in the day, after all foreigners had been ordered to evacuate the areas north of Suzhou Creek. He ducked back into his hotel room and fell flat on the floor, just in time before a large explosion made the entire building shiver. Seconds later, another loud blast erupted, this time even closer.41

  Verhage found his way to the stairs and started groping his way down through a fog of dust. The main lobby was a scene of carnage. The first bomb had hit the Cathay Hotel across the street, blowing in the front door of Palace Hotel and shattering its large window panes, setting off a hail of glass shards. More than a dozen people were lying in pools of blood, injured or dying. The second bomb had crashed through the roof of the Palace Hotel and exploded on the top floor. “Chinese men, women and children were coming down from the roof,” Verhage recalled later. “Their faces were white with plaster, and blood was oozing out through the white.”

  He immediately started looking for his tour guide, 30-year-old Robert Karl Reischauer, a brilliant political scientist from Princeton University. He went to the front of the hotel. Just outside, Nanjing Road was a scene of utter bloody chaos. The ground was littered with broken glass. Scattered everywhere were human remains—mostly nondescript lumps of flesh covered in tattered clothing. A new Lincoln Zephyr was engulfed in tall flames. However, there was no sign of Reischauer. Verhage turned around and headed to the reception. There he found the tour guide, one arm on the counter and the other over the shoulder of a wounded Chinese. His leg was a bloody mess. “Take me out of here,” Reischauer said calmly.

  The two bombs released by the Chinese airplane had struck at exactly 4:27 p.m. The attacks stopped the arms of a clock at the entrance of Cathay Hotel, freezing in time the moment of the twin blasts. The shock waves and the debris had both taken a toll on the mass of people who had been crammed into the street. To Percy Finch, a foreign correspondent, it was as if a giant mower had pushed through the crowd, chewing it to bits. “Here was a headless man, there a baby’s foot, wearing its little red-silk shoe embroidered with fierce dragons,” he wrote. “One body, that of a young boy, was flattened high against a wall, to which it clung with ghastly adhesion.”42

  A sickening stench of burnt flesh filled the air. As the wounded came to, they started moaning. Some were screaming. Part of the facade of the Palace Hotel had been blown away. On the fourth floor, a man clung desperately to the remains of the wall with one hand, waiting for help. It came too late, and he eventually let go, crashing through the glass awning of the hotel’s entrance before hitting the pavement. Others attempted to crawl to safety, scrambling with fumbling limbs over mangled bodies and slipping in the blood that covered the sidewalk.

  Sascha Spunt, who had been married the day before and was on the way to a party celebrating his own wedding, jumped out of his car and helped the injured and dying. He was followed by his younger brother Georges, who watched as a truck pulled up. “Rescue workers started tossing in the mangled remains—half of a human torso, arms, legs, heads,” Georges wrote later. He tried to keep calm by reminding himself he had seen pieces of flesh before, on butchers’ wagons. Then he noticed a worker holding up a bleeding bundle. It was a disemboweled infant. Georges started sobbing uncontrollably.43

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  While the bombs exploded in Nanjing Road, police officer Jules le Rouzic was on duty at Mallet police station on 151 Avenue Edward VII inside the French Concession. From his guard booth near the entrance he had had a good view of everything that went on in the sky this afternoon. Shortly after the explosions on Nanjing Road, he noticed two airplanes approaching from Huangpu River and observed as one of them seemed to be losing height. Moments later, two heavy bombs detached themselves from the aircraft, disappearing out of sight behind nearby buildings. Then a cloud of thick smoke rose from the area around Avenue Edward Vll’s intersection with Boulevard de Montigny. Seconds later came a loud blast. Behind him, inside the office of the guard on duty, le Rouzic heard a voice shouting, “The Great World has been bombed!”44

  The Great World Amusement Center was a six-story building dominated by a tower in the style of a wedding cake. In times of peace, it had offered a large variety of diversions ranging from fortune-telling to gambling, and from sex to removal of earwax. The menus of its small food stalls had included anything from dried fish to stewed intestines. A wide sample of the city’s population had milled around ins
ide, and street performers and pickpockets had vied for space outside. After hostilities had broken out, the building had hastily been transformed into a makeshift shelter and distribution center for rice. The crowds were larger than ever. Now, however, they sought not entertainment, but mere survival.

  On the afternoon of August 14, the throngs gathered around the amusement center were predominantly Chinese. Some were refugees from across the Garden Bridge, who had found temporary homes here on the edge of the French Concession and the International Settlement. Others were simply curious onlookers and as was the case on the Bund, the main show was the drama in the sky. The sight of Chinese aircraft displaying the signature white star on a blue background was accompanied on the ground by triumphant giggling and pointed fingers.

  The mood was excited once more at about 4:45 p.m. when two Chinese aircraft seemed about to make another run on the Japanese positions. Cheers and applause rose from the street. Then sharp-eyed individuals noticed two small dark dots drop from one of the planes—the same bombs that M. le Rouzic had seen.45 They fell with deadly haste, hitting the busy street before anyone had time to react, let alone escape. One left a huge crater near the traffic control tower in the middle of the road. The other exploded a few feet above the ground, causing shrapnel to fly over a large area.46 The explosions were so powerful that they killed a servant at the building of the Y.M.C.A., nearly 700 feet down Boulevard de Montigny.47

  The casualties included several foreigners. On Avenue Edward VII, Rev. Rawlinson was dying in his wife’s arms, while his teenage daughter was watching. Just yards away two other Americans, Hubert Honigsberg and his wife, were killed in their car. It was the same type of carnage as in Nanjing Road, just larger. Death on the most massive scale was at the entrance of Great World Amusement Center, where the fatalities were piled five feet high.48 The victims—men, women and children—had been thrown up against the walls of the buildings. Many were stripped completely naked after the intense gas pressure from the bombs had torn off their clothes.49