On 17 July the Operations Section of the Japanese Staff Department finalised a battle plan which called for the elimination of General Song Zheyuan’s 29th Army and the occupation of the Beijing–Tianjin region. While the hope was to restrict the fighting to north China, it was argued that ‘if full-out war breaks out’, the ‘destruction of the central government’ would take no more than three or four months.72 The Japanese cabinet approved the plan on 20 July.73
War fever now gripped Japan. ‘Some Diet [parliament] members are demanding that a fundamental solution should now be reached,’ the Tokyo correspondent of The Times reported, adding, ‘Hundreds of women stoop to complete “thousand stitch girdles” for troops at the front’, ‘groups of young men spent today careering around the City’ and ‘1600 reactionary patriots marched to the Meiji Shrine’.74 In Shanghai, many too anticipated a new bout of warfare, albeit with less enthusiasm: ‘memories of 1932’, when during their take-over of Manchuria Japanese bombers flattened parts of Shanghai in order to warn Nanjing off from taking any precipitate action, ‘have been recalled by the stream of humble Chinese in every variety of conveyance – rickshaw, taxicab, motor-lorry – with pathetic bundles of possessions coming from Chapei [Zhabei] to the International Settlement during the last 48 hours’.75 (Zhabei was a Chinese neighbourhood of Shanghai to the west of the International Settlement.)
The Japanese had no trouble dealing with the little resistance they encountered as they moved in: Beijing and Tianjin were in Japanese hands by 29 July. Chiang’s response was to beef up resistance by ordering central army units into battle. General Tang Enbo invested Nankou, a town to the north-west of Beijing on the Beijing–Suiyuan railway, which was important to the Japanese if they wanted to advance further into Inner Mongolia. The Japanese, in turn, thrust south to bring central army units at Baoding to battle. The battle for Nankou was intense, with the Japanese throwing artillery, tanks and aeroplanes into the fight. General Tang Enbo was quickly put on the defensive.76 The town was lost on 15 August, the Chinese forces having suffered a large number of casualties. Despite General Tang Enbo’s heroics, the north China generals continued to shun serious battle with the Japanese. A German advisor who investigated the north China front reported: ‘the speed of retreat of our armies appears to have exceeded the schedule of the Supreme Command’.77
Chiang Kaishek’s choice was to accept Japanese control of north China or plunge the country into full-out war. Besides the collapse of resistance in north China, he was also confronted with the dispatch of five army divisions and elements of the Japanese navy to Shanghai. Thirty-two vessels of the Japanese Second and Third Fleets were at the port by 13 August.78 Chiang Kaishek was defiant, stating after the fall of Beijing that ‘from now on there can be no such thing as a “local settlement”’ as ‘China can only hope to obtain justice and peace after she wins a final victory on the battlefield’.79
At 8 p.m. on 7 August, forty-one people took their seats in a meeting room at the Endeavour Society, an officers’ club on Sun Yatsen Road, Nanjing. Chiang Kaishek was in the chair. The attendees included the most senior civil and military officials of the Nanjing government, including: Wang Jingwei; the commander of the Shanxi Army, Yan Xishan; the second most senior figure of the Guangxi Clique, General Bai Chongxi ; and General Feng Yuxiang of the North-west Army. The meeting began with an account by Army Minister He Yingqin of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the fighting that had taken place since then. This was followed by a report on the Japanese troop strength and deployments in China. Chiang Kaishek then took the floor. He declared that he wanted a frank exchange of views, but made no bones about his own position, stating that ‘this war between China and Japan truly is the key moment which will decide whether our country survives or perishes. If we win, our country and our nation will revive and we will turn danger into safety. If not we shall condemn our country to eternal damnation.’80 As the time neared 11 p.m., all those in favour of war were asked to stand up. All did so, agreeing that ‘in military and diplomatic affairs, we shall obey the instructions and arrangements of the central government’. On 13 August, Chiang ordered the Chinese forces at Shanghai into battle, ensuring that the fighting was now no longer a local northern China issue. Chiang had staked his nation.
PART II
MOMENTOUS TIMES
— FIVE —
THE BATTLE OF SHANGHAI
The whole Shanghai front is collapsing and the situation in Shanxi is also precarious, but we must resist Japan to the bitter end and not turn our backs on our original resolve. As to the Communists and the warlords, things will be OK if we give them a bit more power and then work on them with our righteousness and justness.
Chang Kaishek, diary entry (25 October 1937)1
The Battle of Shanghai is still often described, simplistically, either as a plucky but doomed effort by the Nationalists to stand up to the Japanese (as most foreign journalists described it at a time), or as a botched operation in which Chiang Kaishek persisted for too long in the hope of securing foreign support (as some critics among his own generals argued at the time, as well as some foreign ones later).2 Running a war, though, is a complex business, especially at a time when the media was becoming increasingly important, and doubly so when Chiang’s own side was made up of a diverse range of armies, many of which were actively hostile to one another. In the Battle of Shanghai, the Nationalists not only had to make sure that the right units arrived in the right place at the right time, that they were supplied properly, and that their actions were coordinated for the achievement of a common objective. They also had to make sure that the actions on the ground supported the messages they wanted them to deliver to their supporters, to the general population, to various military forces in the country and to foreign audiences. If the Nationalists were less competent at the first set of tasks, they managed the second with much greater success, helped no end by a Japanese obtuseness when it came to judging how their actions would be perceived.
War plans are tricky documents to interpret, not only because military leaders tend to overemphasise dangers in order to secure enhanced budgets, but also because few survive first contact for long. It is nonetheless worthwhile to review China’s and Japan’s avowed plans at the outbreak of war. They give insight into how the two countries judged their own strengths and weaknesses, the strategies they anticipated the enemy would adopt, and the ways in which they planned to counter them. Without some knowledge of these war plans, the initial operations of both the Japanese and the Chinese forces are difficult to understand.
Uppermost in Japanese thinking was the threat from the Soviet Union. In 1937 the Japanese General Staff estimated that so far the Soviet Union had deployed sixteen infantry and three mechanised divisions in the Soviet Far East, with a total of 290,000 troops, 1,200 aeroplanes and thirty submarines. The Japanese Kuantung Army in Manzhouguo, by contrast, had no more than 80,000 men under arms and could put just 239 aeroplanes into the air. In 1936, Japan adopted a massive rearmament and military reform programme to meet the Soviet threat and be ready for a world war anticipated to start after 1940. Because Japan lacked the heavy industry and mineral resources to build the necessary number of aeroplanes, tanks, heavy artillery and ships to catch up with the Soviets, Japanese operational doctrine stressed shock, night attack, close combat, high morale and superior firepower at the point of contact.3 Japan’s foreign policy was coordinated with its military strategy. Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany in November 1936 in the hope of trapping the Soviets in a European quagmire, or at least of reducing the Soviet threat on the Manzhouguo–Soviet border.4
One option open to Japan was simply to be content with what it already had in Taiwan, Korea and Manzhouguo and not bother about China. Had the war begun before 1935, Japan might well have exercised that option. Its war plans of the time did not regard north China as strategically important. If an incident flared up, Japan would send in troops to protect Japanese lives and property, then wi
thdraw once peace had been restored. But Japan’s 1936 war plan did declare north China vital to Japanese national security. Japan had begun to fear the forward policy of the Nationalists in the north which threatened its access to north China’s coal, iron ore and food resources. The Xi’an Incident spooked the Japanese as it heralded an end to the ‘first unity then resistance’ policy of the Nationalists, an enhanced role for the Soviet Union in Chinese affairs, and some reconciliation between the Nationalists and the Communists. Until then the Japanese did not have to worry about any threat to their rear if war was declared with the Soviet Union. Now the chances were that Chinese forces would jump on the opportunity to recover the north, as Chiang Kaishek indeed tried to do even without such a war.
Japan’s 1937 plan therefore stipulated that, in case of war with China, Japanese forces were to occupy the five provinces of north China and the lower Yangzi region,5 the first to secure the Kuantung Army’s rear and the second to cut the Nationalists’ major supply line and destroy its tax base. These two tasks were to be accomplished in a ‘quick victory after a short war’ in order to prevent the Soviet Union from mobilising its forces and exploiting the situation.
By contrast, Nationalist war plans called for a protracted war of attrition. Given the disparity in fire power between the armed forces of the two countries, a straight fight between a Japanese and a Chinese division would have been over in days, probably hours. A Japanese division on war footing consisted of some 25,000 men armed with around 10,000 rifles, 300 light machine guns, 100 heavy machine guns, 300 grenade launchers and 100 pieces of artillery. It had one mechanised unit with 40 light military vehicles and 20 armoured cars, some 6,000 horses and around 300 other vehicles, as well as a chemical warfare unit.6 In early 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army had some 247,000 men under arms, arranged in 17 infantry divisions, 4 tank regiments and 54 air squadrons. Compulsory military service meant that this force could be expanded massively in short order.
The best Chinese divisions, the German-trained Reformed Divisions, of which there were just twenty in 1937, possessed 11,000 troops. Their prescribed armaments consisted of 3,800 rifles, 275 light machine guns, 54 heavy machine guns and 46 pieces of artillery. Chinese armaments, though, were inferior to those of the Japanese. Chinese mortars, for instance, had a maximum range of 1,200 metres, while Japanese ones could hit targets five times that distance. Few even of the Reformed Divisions had been equipped in accordance with the official standard. The Nationalists had just 3,000 vehicles and 10,000 horses and mules in total. The Chinese air force only had 202 serviceable aeroplanes with the ‘total number of bombs only sufficient for 22 full strength sorties’, according to the British air attaché.7 Training levels in the Chinese armies were well below those of the Japanese. China had no navy worthy of the name. Logistics were such a shambles that General Chen Cheng, commander-in-chief at the Battle of Shanghai, remarked that ‘we do not have the ability to supply our front-line troops.’8 Even three or four divisions would not have been able to resist one Japanese division for very long.
General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the chief German military advisor, had a major hand in drafting China’s war plans. ‘War on a national scale is a necessary experience for China and will unify her,’ he declared, suggesting that fighting Japan would do for China what the 1870 Franco–Prussian War had done for the unification of Germany by Prussia.9 The war plans he helped put together provided for two alternative courses of action. The first – and more aggressive of the two – argued for immediate attacks on Japanese troops in north China and preventing Japanese landings in Shandong as well as at Shanghai. If that failed, Plan B called for a withdrawal into the countryside, with a main Nationalist base in Sichuan province in the far west, well protected by high mountains, supported by a productive agriculture and with a large rural population from which troops could be recruited in vast numbers at little cost. Both aimed at keeping the Japanese north of the Great Wall, either straight away or after attrition had weakened the Japanese troops.10
To prepare for the implementation of this strategy, supply depots were established across north China with sufficient ammunition for three months of fighting as well as food and fodder for one month.11 Fortifications were built at Nanjing and Wuhan, at important narrows along the Yangzi river and at port cities such as Canton and Xiamen. China could not possibly match Japan’s mighty navy, but fortifications along the coast and the Yangzi were to be constructed to resist Japanese amphibious landings and keep China’s lines of communication to the outside world open. Battlefields were prepared in north China and a line of fortifications – China’s Hindenburg Line – was erected west of Shanghai, running from the Yangzi south to the sea, in order to isolate the Japanese in the city, if need be, and protect the capital at Nanjing should Shanghai be lost.12 When war broke out in 1937, only a third of the Nationalist plans to build an elite army of 60 Reformed Divisions had been finished, not all fortifications had been completed, arms industries bought from Germany still had to be installed and much materiel was yet to arrive. But the Nationalists were more ready to put up a fight than ever before.
The Battle
On 13 August 1937, Chiang Kaishek activated the more aggressive of his two war plans when he threw his two best divisions, the 87th and the 88th, against the Japanese Special Naval Landing Force, at Shanghai. Chiang’s move was calculated, first, to drive Japanese forces at Shanghai into the sea, and, second, to reduce pressure on Nationalist front lines in north China. After taking Beijing and Tianjin on 28 and 29 July, the Japanese had paused for a week to prepare two follow-up offensives with seven divisions, one to drive west along the Beijing–Suiyuan railway and the other to push 100 kilometres south and bring the Nationalists’ main forces to battle at the city of Baoding.13 For Japan, north China, not Shanghai, remained the main front, until their slow progress at Shanghai became embarrassing.
In Shanghai, tensions had been steadily rising during the weeks before Chiang Kaishek ordered his two best divisions into action. Japanese evacuees from cities up the Yangzi river had swelled the Japanese population of Shanghai to 30,000. The arrival of vessels from Japan’s Yangzi Flotilla and its Third Fleet, designed to operate in coastal areas, had deepened Chinese anxieties. On 9 August, two Japanese marines had been ambushed near the Hongqiao air field to the west of Shanghai, leading to a Japanese demand two days later for the complete withdrawal of the Chinese Peace Preservation Force from Little Tokyo, the Japanese section of the Shanghai International Settlement.14
The British ambassador reported to London that ‘hostilities were inevitable’ if the Japanese did not make a ‘compensating concession’.15 He floated the idea that the British might take over the policing of Little Tokyo. The suggestion was quashed because ‘our troops’ would end up having ‘to fire on Chinese in defence of the Japanese and so draw the odium on ourselves’.16 The citizens of Shanghai knew what was coming: the North China Daily reported on 6 August that ‘the exodus from Chapei and Hongkew [two Shanghai districts] reached alarming proportions … a conservative estimate put the number of refugees [since 26 July] at 50,000.’17
On 14 August, the world woke up to the Battle of Shanghai when China’s air campaign went horribly wrong. The Chinese air force had taken to the sky to hit Japanese naval vessels whose guns had been pounding the 87th and 88th Divisions, which had begun their offensive the previous day.18 Its prime target was the Izumo, Japan’s flagship moored provocatively off the quay in Shanghai opposite the Japanese consulate. No bomb found its target, but stray bombs that afternoon hit the famous Cathay Hotel on the corner of the Bund and Nanjing Road, the nearby Palace Hotel and the Great World Amusement Centre not far away. The Chinese explanation at the time was that flak from the Izumo had hit the bomb carriage of the aeroplanes involved, a way of putting the onus on the Japanese.19 The US aviator Claire Lee Chennault, famous later as commander of the Flying Tigers, stated in his memoirs that the Chinese pilots, forced to fly in at 1,500 feet because of
cloud cover, rather than at 7,500 feet as planned, had failed to adjust their bomb sights.20
The kind of precision bombing required to sink a ship right next to hotels, shops, consulates, offices and apartment buildings was well beyond the cap acity of any aircraft of the time, and certainly not in the bad weather – a typhoon, no less – that prevailed that day. Chennault had designed the raid himself and hence must share a considerable part of the responsibility for its outcome. It was a catastrophe. The North China Herald reported that ‘bombing at the Great World cost 1,047 dead and 303 injured, while 120 persons died at the Cathay and Palace hotels’.21 Foreign journalists spread news of ‘Black Saturday’ around the world. The New York Times called it a ‘terrific’ slaughter, while Le Figaro spoke of ‘a tragic day for Shanghai’.22 The Times commented that ‘what happened yesterday in Shanghai has, perhaps, never been paralleled anywhere else’.23
The Izumo was never hit, despite many more attempts, while the 87th and 88th Divisions failed to reach their objectives: the Japanese Marine Headquarters, a fortified building spanning two blocks, and the Japanese Golf Club, which was in the process of being transformed into an air field.24 The Nationalists had hoped to deliver a decisive blow, an Entscheidungsslacht, as their German advisors put it. They failed because of the fire delivered by Japanese naval guns. Meanwhile the Japanese also fought on from previously prepared strong points throughout Little Tokyo. The Nationalists flung ever more troops against these with little or no reconnaissance, making little headway but incurring unsustainable numbers of casualties. Despite their numerical superiority, the Nationalist forces were unable to overwhelm the Japanese in this first attempt.25
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