Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze
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Despite determined attempts at creating an atmosphere of normalcy, there was no denying that the city was going through its biggest crisis ever and that the future was uncertain. These were not ordinary times after all, and with the hostilities occasionally spilling over the borders into the International Settlement, an inceasing number of people felt it advisable to make the necessary precautions to stay safe. Defying the gregarious mood that usually characterized the expatriates of Shanghai, many now preferred the safety of their homes. When the Municipal Orchestra organized an evening of classical music at the Nanjing Theater, only two thirds of the seats were filled.71
As if to emphasize the precarious situation, several of the foreign garrisons received large reinforcements, many of them the elite of their respective armies. About 800 Italian Grenadiers of Savoy arrived on September 14, “fresh from conquest in Abyssinia,” as local media put it, with pith helmets adorned with large sun goggles.72 They were followed less than a week later by 1,435 U.S. marines, their flat British-style helmets and campaign hats a reminder of the Corps’ exploits two decades earlier on the battlefields of Europe.73
In the Chinese part of the city, no one even tried to pretend that times were anything but unusual. Military experts said Zhabei received the heaviest bombing ever showered over any piece of land of a similar size.74 Some residents in no-man’s-land in the Hongkou and Yangshupu areas were too frightened by the constant fighting to venture out, and some eventually starved to death in their own homes.75
The Mid-Autumn Festival, one of China’s three major traditional holidays, was on September 19, but all celebrations were canceled due to the war situation.76 Weddings were made simpler by the circumstances. The “ceremony” would often consist of a notice in the local paper announcing that a couple had tied the knot. At the end might be an apology for not informing acquaintances directly: “As addresses of friends and relatives have been changed during the trouble, it is regretted that announcements cannot be individually sent.”77
Refugees were quickly emerging as the single most serious problem for Shanghai’s municipal authorities, foreign as well as Chinese. By September, tens of thousands of people uprooted from their homes in the war-torn countryside north of Suzhou Creek had flooded into the International Set-tlement.78 The leaders of the expatriate community felt that urgent action was needed to care for the growing flood of homeless, both out of genuine humanitarian concern and for fear that foreign property could be damaged.
Jacquinot, the one-armed Jesuit, was actively involved in seeking ways to mitigate the plight of the refugees, and an idea was gradually forming in his head. He had followed a public debate that had been ongoing since the late 1920s, on the possibility of creating safe zones for civilians in wartime. He believed that possibly such a zone could be formed in Shanghai. He made the proposal in a meeting with Hasegawa Kiyoshi, the com-mander of the Japanese Third Fleet, in late September. Hasegawa was noncommittal, but Jacquinot was determined to move ahead with the plan no matter what.79
The strain that Shanghai was under also had an economic side to it. Although it had been a bumper year for both rice and cotton, the two most popular crops in the area,80 many farmers were unable to harvest because of continued heavy fighting around the city.81 Labor disputes simmered and occasionally broke out into the open. On September 14, a group of workers hired on short-term contracts by the Fou Foong Flour Mill in the western part of the International Settlement locked themselves inside and refused to leave until a demand of 10 months’ salary was met. Police and members of the Reserve Unit, a special anti-riot outfit, attacked the premises with tear gas and managed to dispel the protesters. Later, ambulances had to drive 25 injured males to various hospitals from the mill.82
As if the city was not already suffering enough hardship, a cholera epidemic had broken out and was taking its toll as well, especially among the poorest inhabitants. As of September 13, it had lasted for a month, with 119 confirmed cases and nine deaths.83 Less than a fortnight later, it had infected 646 and killed 97. Once the outbreak had peaked by early October, it had claimed a total of 355 lives.84 These statistics merely marked the tip of the iceberg, as they counted only the patients at hospitals in the International Settlement, leaving out the probably much larger numbers in the Chinese part of the city.85 In a way, they were collateral damage. A doctor who worked with the patients stated with a great degree of certainty that the disease had probably been brought to Shanghai with troops from the south.86
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“The white house,” was the Japanese soldiers’ name for the large villa hovering over the flat countryside south of Luodian. The former owner, who had obviously been a man of great riches, had called it “Villa of the Lucky Plants.” This name was written over the elaborate gateway along with characters extolling the former owner’s ancestors.87 The entire compound was surrounded by a tall white wall, as if to shield the inhabitants’ wealth from the poverty in the countryside all around it. It had become pockmarked and blackened showing signs of intense and prolonged fighting. The Chinese had held the villa for four weeks, refusing to budge. Entrenched outside, the Japanese Army’s 44th Regiment, also known as the Kochi Regiment, was being steadily worn down as attempts at storming the strong-hold had all failed. Regimental commander Wachi Takaji, the sword-wielding colonel who had reaped much honor when leading the capture of Luodian the month before, had been forced into uncharacteristic passivity.88
Over the time that had passed since arriving at Luodian, the regiment had tried repeatedly to take the building, but with no success. Artillery support was limited because difficulties transporting supplies to the frontline meant that each artillery piece was down to only one fifth of its normal daily allowance of ammunition. The Chinese defenders by contrast were well-equipped, and showed off their impressive firepower every time Wachi threw his troops across the 70 yards separating the Japanese trenches from the white walls, cutting down row after row of Japanese soldiers. This situation had lasted for 27 long days. “This concerns the reputation of the Kochi Regiment,” said Wachi. Another solution had to be found.
On September 19, engineers began digging a tunnel from the trenches towards “the white house.” Four days later, they had dug exactly 35 yards, halving the distance the infantry would have to run across open land before reaching the wall. A new attack was launched on September 23, the second day of the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. On this day in the lunar calendar, the emperor, a living god to most Japanese, would worship at the shrine of his ancestors, confirming the link between the Japan of the present age and the proud Japan of history. It was a reminder to all Japanese of what made them special and set them apart from the rest of mankind. On such a day, the attack could not be allowed to go wrong.
In the early afternoon, the Japanese kicked off the assault in their usual way. First came the artillery bombardment, then air raids. Finally, the tanks rolled up and moved towards the walls, as small clusters of soldiers followed in their tracks. In addition, the attack had one surprise in store for the Chinese. Just as the assault got underway, the mouth of the tunnel suddenly opened up, and soldiers leaped out in single file, so close to the wall that the Chinese machine gunners had no time to swing their barrels towards them. They rushed forward, carrying heavy satchels of explosives. Pressing against the walls, they lit the fuses then hastily sought cover. Loud explosions followed, and as the dust settled, the Japanese poured through the new gaping holes in the walls, fanning out inside the compound. After a fierce, two-and-a-half hour fight, the building was taken over by the Japanese. The regiment’s honor, and Colonel Wachi’s, had been saved.
The capture of “the white house” was part of a major offensive launched by the 11th Division in the Luodian area. It had originally been planned for September 20, but was delayed for several days because preparations took longer than expected, as was usually the case in the difficult countryside around Shanghai. The division attacked south of the town, op
ting for a narrow front in order to assemble enough troops to achieve a powerful, concentrated punch through Chinese positions. The Japanese used massed armor in the attack, deploying aircraft to take out any antitank weapons that appeared. Their tactics worked. The Chinese were pushed back in several sections of the front.89 In order to muster enough forces for the attack, the division had put the Shigeto Detachment in charge of covering its right flank north and west of Luodian. However, the newly arrived detachment, which was still brimming with morale, did more than that, attacking vigorously and trying to push back the Chinese in its assigned sector. The detachment achieved relatively little of any significance, and lost a large number of soldiers. “The detachment has already had 200 casualties,” Matsui wrote. “They can’t go on attacking blindly like this.”90
Further south the 3rd Japanese Division also launched attacks against Chinese positions, mainly in the area in front of Liuhang. The fighting in the area once again showed Japan’s material superiority to be so pronounced that the Chinese feared to use heavy weaponry, even when it was available. All anti-aircraft guns in the area had been positioned near artillery batteries, but counterproductively, they hardly dared release any fire, lest they gave away the artillery’s position. The result was that the Chinese Army enjoyed effectively no air defense whatsoever.91
Generally, the local Chinese reserves were unable to throw back the Japanese, and the see-saw battle that had characterized the front since early September gave way to a several-day period when the Japanese held on to the positions even after dark. Under the circumstances, the Chinese commanders decided to carry out yet another major retreat along the entire front north of Shanghai. They used a lull in the Japanese attacks on September 25 to pull back to a line roughly one mile to the rear. As before, they implemented the withdrawal with perfect discipline, and it was two more days before the Japanese completely understood that their enemy had melted away.92
Following hard on the heels of these Japanese succeses, major changes started to happen. The three divisions that the Japanese high command had ordered dispatched to the Shanghai area early in September gradually started arriving. First to land in the area south of Wusong was the 101st Division, which began disembarkation on September 22, and was ordered to deploy on the left flank of the 3rd Division. The 9th Division arrived in the same area on September 27, followed by the 13th Division on October 1.93 Japan now had five divisions in Shanghai, against more than 25 divisions fielded by the Chinese.
Even if no one could doubt China’s numerical superiority, the disparity was not as drastic as would seem. A typical Japanese division had 15,000 men, and combined with the marines and infantrymen defending Hongkou, the Japanese had roughly 90,000 soldiers at its disposal in and around the city. Chinese divisions, by comparison, frequently had as few as 5,000 men, and therefore it is unlikely that China deployed more than 200,000 soldiers in Shanghai at the time. Besides, the Japanese more than compensated for their numerical inferiority with their large superiority in materiel and airplanes, as well as with their naval artillery, which was still able to reach important parts of the Chinese front.94
All in all, the three new divisions marked a massive boost to the Japanese forces, and Matsui and his staff immediately started preparations for what they hoped would be the final blow to the Chinese defenders. Their plan was simple. They would launch a single powerful thrust across Wusong Creek and move from there to Suzhou Creek. Their aim was to surround and annihilate the main Chinese force in a maneuver that they had intended to carry out ever since they landed in China. After all, encirclement was the fundamental operation favored above any other in Japanese military doctrine. The only reason they hadn’t already staged such an attack long before was a lack of resources. Encirclement with just two divisions, the 3rd and the 11th, would have caused the flanks to be too thinly manned and exposed to Chinese counterattack.95 Now Matsui finally had the strength needed to launch the operation that would trap the Chinese in the city they were supposed to defend.
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Nothing could go seriously wrong if you were in a mortar unit. Most of the time you would be located 500 yards behind the frontline, offering support for the infantry at the sharp end. At least, that was what the soldiers in Maebara Hisashi’s unit told themselves when they shipped off to China. Maebara himself was a 30-year-old reservist, and had unexpectedly been torn out of his civilian routine in late August when he received the order to mobilize. It was inconvenient, but he, too, had left Japan with quiet confidence in victory.96 After it had arrived in the Shanghai area, Maebara’s unit was deployed for several weeks without casualties. However, in the end, they ran out of luck.
During a skirmish, the company’s mortars received three direct hits from Chinese artillery. The shrapnel chewed through the crews, and the shockwave sent bodies and body parts flying through the air, shattering them against the walls of buildings nearby. A lump of red-hot metal had hit one of the soldiers in the chest. His blood poured out in a thick, dense stream, and he died almost instantaneously. Next to him, a piece of shrapnel had sliced open a soldier’s stomach. His intestines had spilled out all at once like a bag of slippery eels. Medics arrived, stuffed the innards back in and hastily unraveled the injured soldier’s puttees in order to use the strips of mud-covered cloth to dress the gaping wound. “This is screwed up,” the injured soldier said in a voice marked by both pain and anger. “Do I really have to die in this hole?” Gradually, his loud swearing transformed into quiet whimpers, then complete silence. He was one of 18 Japanese killed in the attack.
After the shooting along the front died down, Maebara’s unit received orders to cremate those killed and prepare the ashes for the return to Japan. The problem was, they were in the middle of a barren battlefield, and they did not have enough wood for suddenly disposing of 18 corpses. Someone had an idea: let’s get the Chinese to provide the fuel, he suggested. Full of resentment, the soldiers walked to a farm building nearby, tore it down and carried away the beams. As Maebara watched the flames of the pyres rise towards the night sky, two separate thoughts kept recurring in his mind. “If this goes on, I won’t live for very long. I better start bracing myself for the fact that death can occur any moment,” was his first thought. His second thought: “You Chinese made our brothers die in this terrible way. We’ll make you pay! It’s because of you that we’ve come here to fight and suffer. You wanted this war. It’s your fault!” For the first time, Maebara was consumed by actual hatred of the enemy.
He soon found out that he was not the only one who felt this way. A mood of poorly repressed fury spread through the company. Revenge was in the air. The next day guards grabbed three ordinary Chinese who happened to pass by their bivouac. There was no way they could be mistaken for soldiers. They were men in their early 30s, wearing tattered peasant clothes. Their unruly hair and undisciplined demeanor showed they had never worn a uniform. However, they would do. Yelling at the captives while punching and kicking them mercilessly, the Japanese soldiers tied their hands behind their backs and made them kneel in the mud. The Chinese appeared to know something terrible was going to happen to them. All three shut their eyes tight.
A group of soldiers grabbed one of the Chinese and dragged him to the side. They unbuttoned the top of his shirt and forced him to stretch out his neck for a cleaner cut. It didn’t work. The soldier who had taken on the role of executioner was clearly doing it for the first time. He swung his sword ineptly, and brought it down with too little force, managing to make only a gash at the back of the Chinese man’s neck. He swung the sword a second time, and a third. It took four clumsy attempts to finally sever the head from the body. He did not have much more luck with the other two men. When he was done, he was splattered from top to toe in his victims’ blood. “We did poorly today,” the Japanese soldiers complained to each other later that day. “Not a single head came off with just one strike. We’ll have to do a better job next time.”
Shang
hai’s famous waterfront The Bund seen from the south. The Huangpu River is to the right. The WWI memorial is in the foreground. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
Two soldiers in a position on the outskirts of Shanghai. They both wear the German M35 helmet, with the Nationalist Chinese symbol, a white star on a dark blue background. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
A Chinese soldier wearing a typical uniform from the elite 87th and 88th Infantry Divisions deployed in the Shanghai area from the first days of the battle. He is carrying his two stick grenades in pouches hanging from his shoulders. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
Chinese infantry manning defenses outside Shanghai. The soldier in the foreground is aiming a Belgian-made Fabrique Nationale M1930 light machine gun, based on the American M1918 BAR. He has not inserted a magazine into the weapon, making it likely that the group is engaged in mock battle for the benefit of the photographer. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
Chinese soldiers in action. Both men closest to the camera fire Hanyang 88 rifles, modeled on the German Gewehr 88. It had been produced in China’s Hanyang Arsenals since 1895 and was so successful that it even was used by Chinese forces in the Korean War. The soldier in the middle has an umbrella slung across his back. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
A camouflaged Chinese tank captured by the Japanese. It is a Vickers-Armstrongs light tank Mark E Type B. Having rolled off the assembly line at the Elswick Works in New - castle upon Tyne in October 1934, it was one of about 20 Mark E tanks purchased by the Chinese Nationalists in 1935 and 1936 as part of a military modernization drive. The Mark E was one of the most popular tanks in the 1930s. The Type B left room for two crew members in the single turret, providing it with significant firepower. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries