Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

by Harmsen, Peter

  De Fremery, the Dutch spy, believed neither side, basing his argument on considerable experience gathered through his own career in the artillery. “It seems to me highly unlikely the warring parties have used any form whatsoever of poisonous gases,” he wrote in a report. “I am well aware that at least until 1935 the Chinese were heavily opposed to this weapon of war and had not made any preparations for their use, not even for protecting themselves against such as weapon.”61

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  Ogishima Shizuo, the 27-year-old reservist of the 101st Japanese Division who had crossed Wusong Creek early on, was convinced he would not sur-vive the battle for Shanghai, and he started making preparations for his own death. The rotting bodies everywhere on the south bank of the creek told him what needed to be done. If he were killed, it was far from certain that anyone would have the time to have him cremated and send his ashes back to his mother. Instead, he packed a few belongings that he did not need at the front and arranged to have them shipped back home. That way, at least, his family would have some concrete objects to comfort them in their memory of him.62

  After the first confusing days following the crossing, the frontline had stabilized somewhat. The two enemy armies stared at each other across 150 yards of no-man’s-land. Every now and then, the Japanese officers would order charges against the Chinese lines. The attacks invariably ended the same way. Rows of soldiers were cut down by the enemy’s heavy machine guns, and the survivors hastily retreated to their own lines. The unfortunates who were left between the frontlines with injuries so severe that they could not move were condemned to slow deaths, beyond rescue. Even though their screams were almost unbearable, no one dared to venture out and bring back their wounded comrades. The Chinese snipers never slept.

  Incessant rain had turned the trenches into a knee-deep bog where cooking was impossible. Instead, meals consisted of handfuls of sticky rice. Weapons frequently malfunctioned. At one point, all the heavy machine guns in Ogishima’s company were sent back for repairs, forcing the soldiers in their dugouts to rely on their rifles and their bayonets, not much different from generations of infantrymen before them. Also like earlier generations of infantrymen, much of their talk revolved around how much worse off they were compared to the artillery and the transportation troops enjoying relatively comfortable lives far behind the front.

  The officers grew paranoid that the mounting casualties and the abject conditions overall would cause dereliction in the ranks. The soldiers were regularly lined up so that their health status could be checked. Anyone trying to fake a disease ran the risk of being branded a deserter, and deserters were shot. The officers’ suspicions were not entirely baseless. “The soldiers in the frontline only have one thought on their minds,” Ogishima wrote in his diary. “They want to escape to the rear. Everyone envies those who, with light injuries, are evacuated. The ones who unexpectedly get a ticket back in this way find it hard to conceal their joy. As for those left in the frontline, they have no idea if their death warrant has already been signed, and how much longer they have to live.”

  Like on the battlefields of Flanders a generation earlier, lives were expended on a massive scale in return for little or no territorial gain. Also like Flanders, the terrain favored defense. Nohara Teishin, a soldier from the 9th Division, lived through a terrible fight against an entrenched and partly invisible enemy who fired at the advancing Japanese through holes in the walls of abandoned farm buildings. The officers urged on the privates, who charged across open fields. They would run for a short stretch, fall on their stomachs, catch their breath and resume the attack. Out of 200 men, only about ten were still fit to fight after the battle. “All my friends died there,” he later said. “You can’t begin to describe the wretchedness and misery of war.”63

  Watanabe Wushichi, an officer who also served with the Japanese 9th Division, faced a special challenge. He was responsible for securing water supplies to soldiers in the frontline. It would seem to be a simple task in countryside filled with large and small streams, but not much of the water was potable. Ponds and creeks throughout the area were filled with the fly-covered corpses of men and horses emitting a horrible stench. For many soldiers, the thirst gradually became unbearable, and the moment someone stumbled over a new unpolluted well, the soldiers would crowd around it and, with surprising speed, turn it into a mud pool. To prevent that from happening, the officers posted soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets at each newly discovered water source.64

  Like most other Japanese, Watanabe had been surprised by the tenacity of the Chinese defenders, and the sheer number of those willing to die for their cause. On the occasions when he had the chance to inspect conquered Chinese pillboxes, he was awestruck by the sight of dead defenders literally lying in layers. Childlike features showed that many of them couldn’t even have reached the age of 20. Some of the Chinese corpses were still clutching their rifles, and the Japanese often found it impossible to prise them from their hands. It was, they said, as if their ghosts had returned to offer resistance.65

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  The battle might not have been going China’s way, but its diplomatic behavior in mid-autumn showed continued confidence. World public opinion, at least in the democratic nations, was largely on China’s side, and calls were growing for Japan to pay for its aggressive behavior. On October 5, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a speech in Chicago that, albeit in veiled figurative language, called for concrete steps to be taken against Japan. “It would seem to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading,” Roosevelt said. “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the community against the spread of the disease.”66

  Coinciding almost exactly with Roosevelt’s speech, Chiang Kai-shek instructed his foreign ministry to push for international sanctions against Japan with the aim of depriving the resource-starved island nation of oil, iron and steel—raw materials necessary for waging war. The League of Nations had proven an inefficient tool for rallying support for concrete measures against Japan. The Chinese diplomats also had few hopes of any tangible results coming out of the conference in Brussels. However, they felt some confidence that a conciliatory Chinese tone at the conference could help win sympathy. That way, Japan would appear to be the inflexible party, and the road to sanctions would be cleared.67

  Optimistic that deft diplomacy could come to China’s rescue, Chiang Kai-shek was not in a mood to settle for peace at any price. On October 21, Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki approached the German ambassador in Tokyo, Herbert von Dirksen, with an inquiry about China’s willingness to negotiate. Germany declared it was prepared to act as mediator, and in response the Japanese government laid out its demands. These included, among other things, important Chinese concessions in the north of the country as well as an expanded demilitarized zone around Shanghai. Even so, the German go-betweens considered the requests rather moderate, and Oskar Trautmann, Berlin’s ambassador in Nanjing, conveyed them to Chiang Kai-shek.

  Initially, Chiang did not reveal his views, but instead asked the German envoy about his. Trautmann said he considered the Japanese demands a basis for further talks, and used the example of Germany in the Great War as a warning. The sorry end that Imperial Germany met showed that it was unwise to postpone negotiations until complete military exhaustion had set in. Once that point had been reached, participation in any talks would take place from a disadvantaged position. Chiang was not convinced. He replied that he could only accept negotiations with the Japanese if they were willing first to restore the situation to its pre-hostilities state. There was little room for compromise.68

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  Once the long-expected Guangxi troops had all arrived at the front by the middle of October, the southern general Bai Chongxi’s plan for the counterattack into the Japanese right flank picked up speed. Participa
nts at a meeting of the National Military Council agreed on the need to act fast. “By seizing the opportunity to strike at the enemy at his moment of fatigue,” they said, “it will be possible to break through the troops that have already advanced across Wusong Creek.”69 The attack was set for October 21. It would begin in the evening, so the Chinese could take advantage of their natural ally, darkness, in the initial period of the operations.

  In the days that remained, the Chinese prepared their assault force. It was built around a core consisting of the four Guangxi divisions, which were extricated from the battle around Chenjiahang. This created an accumulation of troops behind the Chinese front that the Japanese reconnaissance planes could not help but notice. “The enemy will launch a counterattack along the entire front tonight. It seems the planned attack is mainly targeted at the area south of Wusong Creek,” Matsui wrote in his diary on October 21, just hours before the Chinese moved. He actually welcomed the prospect. “It will give us an opportunity to catch the enemy outside of his prepared defenses, and kill him there.”70

  At 7:00 p.m., the Chinese artillery barrage began. One hour later, the troops started moving east. The left wing of the Chinese attack, north of Wusong Creek, was led by the 176th Guangxi Division. At first, it made rapid progress, but soon it ran into the same obstacles that caused any attacker in this area, whether Chinese or Japanese, to lose speed—creeks and canals cutting through the country everywhere, at all angles. The vanguard feared that if it moved too fast, the supply train would not be able to keep up, and as dawn approached, it gave up much of the ground it had gained, hoping to take it back the following night.71

  The attack south of Wusong Creek, led by the 174th Guangxi Division, did not fare any better. It ran into unexpectedly strong enemy resistance, and was unable to force its way across the canals it encountered, as bridge-building material had not been prepared in sufficient quantities. Before dawn, fearing artillery and air attack, that division, too, decided to withdraw back behind the start line, abandoning all the territory it had won at the cost of much blood during the night. On both sides of the creek, the Chinese divisions dug in, hoping to be able to stand their ground during the dangerous daylight hours when the Japanese could enjoy the full advantage of their superiority in the air.

  As expected, the counterattack came after sunrise on October 22. In the 176th Guangxi Division’s sector north of the creek, the Japanese had surrounded an entire battalion before noon. A few hours later, they had wiped it out completely, every man from the battalion commander down. The main success that day was scored by a Guangxi unit subjected to an attack by Japanese infantry supported by five tanks. Their front initially was close to collapsing, but a hastily arranged defense succeeded in beating back the Japanese. Of the tanks, one was destroyed, two were stuck in a canal, and two retreated—testimony to the near-impossibility of tank warfare in the river country around Shanghai.72

  The night between October 22 and 23 saw the Chinese move under the cover of darkness to take back some of the positions they had lost during the daytime. Then dawn broke over the last and crucial day of the Chinese attack. This time the Japanese were mobilizing all available resources to stop the advance, as the commanders of the Guangxi troops commented later in the after-action report. “The Japanese enemy’s army and air force employed every kind of weapon, from artillery to tanks and poison gas,” it said. “It hit the Chinese front like a hurricane, and resulted in the most horrific losses yet for the army group since it entered the battle.”73

  From the moment the sun rose, the Japanese airplanes were in the air. At 9:00 a.m., they descended on the soldiers of the already severely battered 174th Guangxi Division south of Wusong Creek. A Guangxi general who survived the attack described what happened: “The troops were either blown to pieces or buried in their dugouts. The 174th disintegrated into a state of chaos.” Other units were chopped up in similar fashion. By the end of October 23, the Chinese operation had cost a huge number of casualties including two brigade commanders, six regimental commanders, dozens of battalion and company commanders and 2,000 soldiers. Three out of every five Chinese soldiers in the first wave had been either killed or injured. The assault had to be halted.74

  The entire counterattack had been a fiasco. Some Guangxi veterans would hold grudges for years against the officers who sent them into a hopeless battle. First of all, they had chosen to attack the enemy in the wrong place, hitting him exactly where he was at his strongest. Despite the recent reinforcements, the Japanese remained undermanned in the Shanghai area, and to gain a critical mass in a frontal attack like the one across Wusong Creek, they had to stretch their troops thin everywhere else. A powerful Chinese counterattack further north would have had a much better chance of succeeding. “But Bai Chongxi wanted to punch through the center of the enemy forces to show the fighting ability of the Chinese Army to the world,” Lan Xiangshan, a Guangxi officer, wrote later in his memoirs.75

  With hindsight, it was obvious that it had been an impossible mission, and it had been launched with a minimum of preparation. According to a possibly apocryphal claim made by Lan Xiangshan, when Bai Chongxi outlined the attack on a map, he did not pay any attention to the scale, resulting in far too large a front for the two divisions leading the charge. There was also little reconnaissance undertaken, and not enough engineering materiel to overcome the numerous waterways that the troops encountered. Most seriously, the commanders had picked troops entirely unsuited for an undertaking of this difficulty. Many of the Guangxi troops had been absorbed from local militia-type units with very little actual combat experience. Ignorant and incompetent leadership “had forced the Guangxi troops to make extreme sacrifices,” Lan Xiangshan wrote. “And it had all been for nothing.”76

  To the German advisors, the Chinese practice of sending new troops straight to the frontline, and often to the most critical sectors, was also a cause of dismay. In the desperate situation faced by the Chinese generals, with a front that could buckle at any time, it was perhaps understandable, but in light of the need to preserve forces for a protracted war, it did not make sense in the long term. Freshly arrived in the Shanghai area, reinforcements from elsewhere in China invariably faced a situation that was completely alien to them, and without proper preparation for warfare in the special terrain offered in an unfamiliar part of the country, they were at a severe disadvantage. As a result they suffered enormous losses.77

  CHAPTER

  7

  The “Lost Battalion”

  OCTOBER 24—NOVEMBER 4

  THE FRONT WAS COLLAPSING. THAT MUCH WAS CLEAR TO ZHANG Boting as he rode in his staff car west out of Shanghai on his way to his high-level rendezvous. Stragglers and small groups of injured soldiers staggered along the road, which ran parallel with the railway to Nanjing, away from the city and away from danger. It was a chaotic scene. Discipline among the scattered groups of military men was breaking down. That made them easier targets. Enemy aircraft were constantly circling in the sky, scouting for prey on the ground below. Whenever the pilots spotted a cluster of Chinese soldiers, they swept down, nearly touching the treetops, and strafed them mercilessly. Zhang’s own driver had to stop the vehicle repeatedly to take cover.1

  Zhang Boting was the 27-year-old chief of staff of the 88th Infantry Division, the German-trained elite unit that had been fighting in the area around the North Train Station since the start of the battle. On the morning of October 26, the same day as he was traveling to his meeting, the Third War Zone deputy commander Gu Zhutong had called Sun Yuan-liang, who had led the division in battle since its arrival in August. Gu Zhutong had surprising news. As everyone had suspected, the Chinese Army was about to withdraw from northern Shanghai. However, the plan was to carve the 88th Division into smaller independent units and have them stay behind in Zhabei to wage guerrilla-style warfare behind enemy lines. Sun Yuanliang thought it would be a pointless waste of the soldiers, but he was unable to explain his thoughts on the matter fully over th
e telephone. Instead, he dispatched Zhang Boting.

  After several miles, which felt longer than they were because of the constant air raids, Zhang’s car stopped by a narrow river. He got out and walked for another two miles until he came to a small straw hut. It looked innocuous from the outside, but looks were deceptive and the entire battle of Shanghai was being waged from inside. It was Gu Zhutong’s field head-quarters. When Zhang Boting entered, Gu Zhutong was studying a map of the deteriorating situation in and around the city. Zhang Boting gave an account of the situation at the front and at the same time described the conditions he had witnessed on the way to the meeting. He urged Gu Zhutong to immediately withdraw his headquarters to a safer place. They then moved on to the main topic.

  “Chiang Kai-shek wants your division to stay in Zhabei and fight,” Gu Zhutong said. “Every company, every platoon, every squad is to defend key buildings in the city area, and villages in the suburbs. You must fight for every inch of land and make the enemy pay a high price. You should launch guerrilla warfare, to win time and gain sympathy among our friends abroad.” The command was more about diplomacy than war-winning tactics. The so-called Nine Power Conference was set to meet in Brussels the following week,2 and it was important that China kept a presence in Shanghai, as the foreigners would immediately appreciate the importance of the city. If the war had moved on to unknown hamlets in the Chinese countryside by the time the delegates met in Brussels, it would be harder to convince them of the urgency of the matter. It all made sense politically, but not militarily. Zhang Boting asked permission to speak.