Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

by Harmsen, Peter

  Japanese infantrymen in their trenches north of Suzhou Creek on November 1 1937. Engineers have prepared a smokescreen and the soldiers are ready to go over the top. They are carrying as little gear as possible for the sake of mobility. The lack of composition gives the photo an immediate feel like few others from the Shanghai battle. Courtesy Asahi Shimbun

  Japanese soldiers march into Nanshi, the southern pre-dominantly Chinese part of Shanghai, in early November 1937. Parts of the district were just as devastated as Zhabei further up north, which had been subject to deliberate arson by retreating Chinese. Courtesy Asahi Shimbun

  Japanese infantry prepare to move into the last unoccupied part of Chinese Shanghai. The city appears deserted. The advance of the Japanese Army in the last part of the battle set off large refugee streams as word spread of its ruthless treatment of civilians in areas under its control. Courtesy Asahi Shimbun

  A Japanese soldier’s grave near Shanghai. The Japanese army preferred to cremate its dead, but the high fatality rates in the battle often made a hasty burial, or no burial at all, a preferable method. This grave, however, seems to have received special care and attention. Author’s collection

  Japanese infantry cross Suzhou Creek in November 1937. The creek was the last major obstacle the Japanese army faced before conquering Shanghai. Engineers have laid a pontoon bridge across. When time was of the essence, the engineers would step out into the water and hold up the planks, allowing the soldiers to run across in single file. Courtesy Asahi Shimbun

  The Japanese invasion force has invited Western journalists to visit its positions near Wusong. The cameraman is Harrison Forman, shooting footage for the “March of Time” newsreel service. He covered major parts of the war in Asia and was also present in Poland at the time of the German attack in 1939. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries

  Shanghai’s new rulers: Japanese marines inspect items belonging to two Sikh men. From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries

  CHAPTER

  9

  Aftermath

  ANYONE APPROACHING SHANGHAI TOWARDS THE END OF 1937 WOULD have been dumbfounded by the terrible destruction that had been wrought on the area during the course of three months of war. When Robert Guillain, a French journalist, arrived from Japan aboard the passenger ship Nagasaki Maru in early November, he was struck by the blackened ruins of Wusong, greeting him as silent testimony to the just-ended battle. “The entire town and the villages all round it had been horribly destroyed, burned and razed to the ground by the bombing. Astonished, I realized the savagery of modern war. In the surrounding countryside, even the smallest farm building had been shelled and consumed by fire. The trees had been blown to shreds. For mile after mile the scene along the riverbank was one of ruins and scorched earth, dotted with the charred skeletons of trees and signposts.”1

  German correspondent Wolf Schenke knew Shanghai from before the war. It was a changed city that met him on his return on November 12.2 A walk through the nearly empty streets of Hongkou confronted him with “the most sinister atmosphere” he had ever felt anywhere. The buildings were mostly gone. Smaller structures had been turned into heaps of rubble. Telephone wires had been blown apart by the shock waves of the explosions and were hanging limply just above the heads of the passing pedestrians or were lying on the ground. “What life, what crowds had been on the Broadway before! Now the rain poured incessantly from low-hanging clouds on the fully deserted streets. The only sign of life was in the form of Japanese military aircraft flying past at high speed and of Japanese sen-tries wrapped in long raincoats who were standing at the corners with fixed bayonets.”3

  In a city where hardly a single street had escaped harm, the district of Zhabei was the epicenter of devastation. The immediate vicinity of the North Train Station had been reduced to a sinister lunar landscape, the gutted buildings standing like rugged moon cliffs. The asphalt roads were riven by deep fissures, similar to those caused by earthquakes. Liliane Willens, the young Jewish Russian girl, was taken by her father on a tour of the area after the fighting had ended and the blaze extinguished. She was overwhelmed by the comprehensive destruction. “I suddenly understood that wars meant the killing of real people, not death toll statistics printed in newspapers and mentioned on the radio,” she wrote in her memoirs.4 It was no wonder that even the expatriates who had gradually become used to the artillery were in a state of shock. Rarely before in the history of human conflict had a major city been subject to this level of destruction.

  Chinese officials attempted to put a positive spin on the battle before leaving the city and heading for Nanjing. It was important to let people know that their sacrifices had not been in vain. “What has been learned in Shanghai in the past 90 days,” Mayor Yu said, “could very well be turned into good use for the whole nation in the war of resistance. The confidence of the people of Shanghai in a final victory cannot fail to have been shared by their brethren throughout the country.”5 He was speaking as if the war was over in Shanghai, and it was true that the big war had come to an end. However, a small, low-intensity conflict continued to brew, and would claim many more lives in the months and years ahead.6

  As early as spring 1938, reports emerged of armed Chinese bands forming in the countryside around Shanghai. Residents of the foreign areas fre-quently heard shooting on the fringes of the city. In August of that year, guerrillas were able to hoist the Chinese flags for a few hours in the suburbs. In the spring of 1939, the threat had become so pronounced that the Japanese military began constructing a system of fortifications at Wusong.7 Meanwhile, the civilian population had not only the war to worry about. The withdrawal of the government left a vacuum that was taken over by mafia-style gangs. “There was nothing they would not do and no evil they would not commit, with the result that good people vanished without a trace and bandits arose in great number, committing murders and rapes every day,” an anonymous resident wrote in a letter to the remnants of the municipal government.8

  In late 1937, the Japanese could not know what would happen that far in the future. They thought they had won. On December 3, Matsui Iwane’s army staged a victory parade through the unoccupied International Settlement, which was their right as one of the governing powers. It was a serious misjudgment. Japanese civilians and ronin were commandeered to act as jubilant masses lining the route, waving national flags. Some foreigners felt provoked. A number of fistfights broke out between Japanese and western residents. When the parade passed by the Great World Amusement Center where hundreds had died on “Black Saturday,” a Chinese man jumped to his death from the top of a building, shouting as he fell: “Long Live China!”9

  When the parade moved down Nanjing Road, the accompanying police grew tense. This was the most risky part. Suddenly, a grenade was thrown from a window. It exploded, injuring four Japanese soldiers and one British police officer. Matsui’s battle-hardened veterans immediately fanned out to find and kill the assassin, but it was a Chinese police officer who shot him dead.10 The parade had become the fiasco that most had expected. It did nothing to ingratiate Japan with the people of Shanghai, and it showed that the Japanese would never be able to control even this small corner of China, let alone the vast country in its entirety.

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  The battle for Shanghai had turned out to be the bloodiest interna-tional battle in Asia since the Russo-Japanese War earlier in the century, and it was largely Chinese blood that had been spilled. By late October, the Japanese estimated that China had suffered 250,000 military casualties fighting for the city.11 In the months after the end of the battle, the Chinese put the number at 187,200.12 Some even estimated that it was as high as 300,000.13 No matter the exact figure, the result of the battle was carnage of catastrophic dimensions, which hit Chiang Kai-shek’s best German-trained divisions with disproportionate severity. China took a beating that it would not recover from f
ully until 1944, after massive American aid.

  The high casualty rate was the result of a combination of factors. Many Chinese soldiers went into the battle fully expecting to die. Their willingness to throw themselves into suicidal attacks against well-fortified positions pushed fatality rates far higher than they would otherwise have reached. Chinese tactics also contributed to the casualty rate. Their use of their numerical superiority to counterbalance Japan’s material edge led to what was in essence a contest of flesh against steel. In a rather grim sense, the approach did have some logic to it, but nevertheless it was in stark contrast to the Chinese commanders’ reluctance to sacrifice any of their expensive imported equipment. At the same time as they were willing to squander their very best formations with almost complete abandon, they protected key weaponry to the point of not using it. The elite 87th and 88th Divisions were nearly used up in a few days of intense fighting in late August, while the Pudong artillery kept its activity close to a minimum for the entire three months for fear of attracting Japanese air raids.

  One must question what Chiang Kai-shek got in return for this massive sacrifice. The answer depends on what he set out to achieve, and there is no consensus on this, partly because he was in all likelihood prompted into action by a mixture of motives. If his main objective was to lure the Japanese away from the north, where they had won a series of easy victories, the Shanghai battle was a Chinese success. As the autumn of 1937 progressed, the Japanese commanders were forced to increasingly divert their attention, along with men and materiel, to the tactically much more complex area around Shanghai, where their technical superiority counted for less than on the north Chinese plain. However, moving the war to the center of China came with its own risks. It jeopardized the nation’s economic heartland, which was also close to its political capital in Nanjing, and ultimately invited a Japanese occupation that would last for nearly eight years.

  If Chiang Kai-shek was also motivated by a wish to attract foreign attention, it is less obvious whether he got what he wanted. He certainly had the opportunity to wage war in front of an audience of thousands, assembled in the International Settlement and French Concession, as well as in front of the rest of the world who could follow the conflict via the media. Shanghai was already home to dozens of foreign correspondents before the war broke out, and with the onset of hostilities, many more arrived by steamship to report on the evolving conflict. For three long months, Shanghai was on the front pages of the world’s major newspapers. The Chinese also proved adept at propaganda, getting maximum mileage out of, for example, the “Lost Battalion’s” desperate and militarily futile fight in Zhabei in late October. Still, none of the great powers was ever tempted to step in and offer any kind of substantial support to China. Even the Brussels conference turned out to be of no direct help to the Chinese cause.

  It was not just the Western world that was interested in the conflict, but also the Soviet Union. Chiang Kai-shek held high hopes that Moscow could provide help, and historical records seem to suggest that Soviet diplomats deliberately goaded him on with vague promises of support. China fought in order to invite Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Even so, the end result may have been the exact opposite. Because China entered into war with Japan, the Soviet Union didn’t have to. Any attack that Japan might have launched against the Soviet Union was made impossible, at least in the medium term, by the need to subdue the Chinese giant, who might have been weak, but was a giant nonetheless. The Soviet Union did start providing material aid to China—the first of nearly 300 Russian attack and bomber aircraft arrived in mid-October14—but it was a poor substitute for a real ally. Also, while the Soviet Union emerged as a reluctant partner for China, China lost the robust assistance it had received from the Germans.

  ————————

  The Germans played a key role in Shanghai in 1937. Every major Chinese unit had at least one German advisor attached to it. This was reflected at several different levels. Chiang’s strategic decision to make a stand in Shanghai appears to have been heavily influenced by Falkenhausen’s views. Similarly, the chief German advisor seems to have had a considerable impact on China’s tactical choices. His opinions about the need to hold on to the town of Luodian, or to concentrate most of the fighting during the dark hours, also coincided with actual Chinese behavior in the field. German officers further down the hierarchy lent a hand in the fight against Japan, whether it was because they felt loyalty towards China or because they simply craved a chance to test their skills in actual battle. It must be considered a little miracle that, as far as can be judged from the sources, no German lost his life in Shanghai.

  Despite their enthusiasm, the Germans gradually discovered that their influence was waning. Chiang Kai-shek and his commanders started ignoring their opinions. They did not listen when the Germans suggested launching surprise assaults against weak areas along the Japanese line, or proposed organizing speedy counterattacks against landing forces before they had built up critical mass. More seriously, Chiang held on to Shanghai long after it made any sense, militarily or politically, to do so, at a time when the Germans would have considered it more opportune to cut losses and withdraw in an orderly fashion to better positions in the rear. The German must have come to realize what was meant when it was said that Chiang’s stubborn fury was both “his greatest strength and his greatest fault.”15 Chiang had accepted the initial German proposal to fight for Shanghai, and he was determined to see it through to the end, at whatever cost to his men.

  The Germans left China and returned home mostly during the course of 1938, just in time for the war in Europe. They seem generally not to have put their China experience to any particular use. The lessons they had learned about urban warfare were apparently largely ignored, however useful they might have been in Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 and 1943, or in countless other European cities. Instead, they all had fairly conventional experiences during the war. Falkenhausen headed the military government in Belgium from 1940 to 1944 and was put on trial after the war mainly for his role in the execution of Belgian hostages. He was returned to Germany and released in 1951. He died in 1966, at the age of 87. Chiang Kai-shek remained grateful for his German chief advisor’s services and provided assistance to him, mostly in the form of money, in the post-war years.16

  One German, at least, ended up with a story stranger than fiction. That was Robert Borchardt, the officer whose Jewish ancestry had put his officer career in limbo. Back in Germany, he left the army but wrote the bulk of an after-action report, Die Schlacht bei Shanghai, or The Battle at Shanghai, for the German High Command. In the meantime, his father had been interned in Dachau concentration camp, before being released and emigrating to the United Kingdom. But even though Robert Borchardt had been given good reasons to hate the Nazis, he ended up fighting harder for them than most.

  When war broke out, he accepted an offer to return to the armed forces. Promoted to the rank of captain, he was involved in setting up Sonderverband 288, a unit that was to have operated in North Africa and the Middle East in an unconventional role similar to that of the Long Range Desert Group, the British commando force. The Sonderverband never came to fulfill its original purpose, but was attached to the Afrika Korps as a standard combat unit. Borchardt was put in charge of an armored recon-naissance company and received the Knight’s Cross in August 1941. This made him one of the highest decorated Germans of Jewish descent during the war. Later, he had a simple explanation for why he had fought for a regime that had murdered millions of people like him. “I served because I wanted to prove Hitler’s racial nonsense wrong,” he said. “I wanted to prove that people of Jewish descent were indeed brave and courageous soldiers.”17

  ————————

  Even if the Chinese did most of the suffering in and around Shanghai in 1937, the battle also turned out far costlier for the Japanese than any of the proud empire’s generals and admirals had foreseen. By November 8, the total number of Japan
ese military casualties in the battle was 9,115 dead and 31,257 injured.18 The Japanese forces benefited from crushing superiority in artillery and air power, but this could not make up for the fact that the soldiers on the frontline had to pay the price for their superiors’ consistent arrogant underestimates of Chinese strength and will to fight. The dispatch of reinforcements happened in a piecemeal fashion, and Ma-tsui and the field commanders never felt they had quite enough men at their disposal to bring about a quick and decisive end to the campaign.19

  Nevertheless, as the battle for Shanghai approached its end, Matsui gained confidence that he had build up enough momentum to deal a blow to Chiang Kai-shek from which he would never recover. In an interview with a German reporter in late October, Matsui had said that after taking Shanghai the Japanese Army would march on to the political capital of Nanjing if necessary.20 He was a man with keen political instincts, who knew that it was always better to ask forgiveness after the fact than seek permission before. “I never asked orders from my government,” he told a group of journalists. “Everything that is happening here is taking place under my entire responsibility.”21

  It is doubtful that the Japanese would have continued to Nanjing without an aggressive general like Matsui in charge. During the first days after the fall of Shanghai, they merely pursued the retreating Chinese columns. This was a sound tactical move, and did not necessarily imply any wider-ranging strategic decision to go all the way to Nanjing. Yet, after the Japanese staged another surprise amphibious landing on November 13, this time on the south bank of the Yangtze River, it seemed there was very little shielding the Chinese Army from complete collapse. On November 15, Japanese commanders in the Shanghai area decided to head for Nanjing and bring an end to the war once and for all.22