On 16 August, Chiang Kaishek ordered a second attack, Operation Iron Fist. Designed by Colonel Hans Vetter, one of the German advisors, Iron Fist aimed to cut through Japanese lines in two places and punch towards Shanghai’s main river, the Huangpu, and cut Little Tokyo into three separate sections. This time, Japanese strong points were to be skirted around. Some units penetrated as far as the last street before the river, but once more poor intelligence, lack of coordination and limited firepower meant that Operation Iron Fist fell at the last hurdle.26 The creeping barrage the Nationalist artillery was supposed to lay down in front of its advancing infantry troops was too far forward. The Japanese defenders had ample time to ready their machine guns, mortars and rifles once the barrage had passed overhead. By 19 August Iron Fist had lost its momentum.27
Then the tide turned. On 23 August, the 3rd and 11th Divisions of the Imperial Japanese Army began the largest amphibious landing ever attempted to date. Well before sunrise, landing craft ferried the first wave of troops to their designated landing places, exploiting the high tide to deposit their cargoes as high as possible up the five-metre-tall river dike. The 11th Division disembarked at Chuangshakou, a town some 16 kilometres up the Yangzi river from where the Huangpu joins it. The 3rd Division’s target was Wusong, a fort at the mouth of the Huangpu river a few kilometres north of Shanghai. By 7 a.m., the Japanese had stabilised beachheads at Shizilin, Chuanshakou and Wusong.28 Over the next few days they unloaded tanks and artillery, while engineers constructed a pier and some roads. By this time, the Japanese air force had secured control over the skies above Shanghai, not because their aeroplanes were superior to those of the Nationalists but because the Chinese could not afford to sustain further losses and so were forced to withdraw. The 3rd Division was poised to wheel around Shanghai, cutting off Nationalist lines of retreat, while the 11th Division stood ready to strike directly south into Shanghai.
Nonetheless, General Matsui Iwane, the commander-in-chief of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army which had just landed, found he needed until late October to overcome Nationalist defenders in between the beachheads and Shanghai. The region increasingly resembled a First World War battleground, covered in trenches, its dark earth churned up and pockmarked by craters, bodies spread through no-man’s land, with the blasts of exploding shells and the whistling of bullets filling the air. As long as the defenders found easy cover among the canals and streams that criss-crossed the area, they hindered the movement of Japanese units. For Japan, supply soon became a difficulty, as cargo first had to be transferred from transports to lighters, then landed at one of the beachheads, and finally moved to the battlefront over waterlogged terrain. Because of shortages, rates of fire were reduced to one fifth of standard daily quotas.29 Only on 22 September, after the Nationalist stand at Shanghai had lasted for more than two months, did Tokyo approve the despatch of three additional divisions.30
The Japanese had to fight hard for each metre gained. The Nationalist front line held until 11 September. Their forces then pulled back in good order to the Wusong creek, midway between the Yangzi river and Shanghai, holding it successfully for nearly a month.31 The arrival at the front of four Guangxi Army divisions led to an attempt at a counter-offensive on 21 October. Following a barrage at dusk, the 174th and 176th Divisions of the Guangxi Army attacked at night to avoid bombardment by Japanese planes. Initially they made rapid progress, but they lost their momentum and dug in before sunrise, waiting for the Japanese counter-offensive. They tried again the next night, again without success. Then, on 23 October, according to their commander-in-chief, Chen Cheng, the Japanese ‘hit the front like a hurricane, resulting in the most horrific losses … the troops were either blown to pieces or buried in their dugouts’.32
Following this setback, Nationalist and Guangxi Army forces retreated to their next line of defence at Zoumatang creek. Reinforced and resupplied, General Matsui ordered an offensive using maximum firepower on 25 October to prevent the Chinese forces from consolidating their positions. The Chinese were forced to pull back further to the southern shore of the Suzhou creek. This creek – a river, really – originates in Suzhou, runs along the southern border of the Zhabei district when it enters Shanghai, provides the dividing line between Little Tokyo and the rest of the International Settlement to the south, and then flows into the Huangpu river. Its high banks, which prevent it from flooding Shanghai, offer excellent protection to defenders and make crossings difficult.33
On 1 November, Japanese units secured a beachhead on the southern shore of the Suzhou, after which they were able to push large numbers of forces across it.34 To make matters worse, on 5 November, the Japanese conducted an amphibious landing at Hangzhou Bay to the south of Shanghai, which took the Nationalists, once more let down by intelligence failures, completely by surprise. The single division and three artillery batteries of the Nationalists defending the area were no match for the three divisions of Japanese.35 General Matsui’s forces moved south while the new arrivals moved north, threatening to trap the Chinese forces in Shanghai in a pincer movement.
They narrowly escaped this fate. Nationalist field commanders had urged Chiang to order a retreat for weeks, but he had resisted, hoping that his forces might hold out until a meeting in Brussels of the signatories of the 1922 Nine Power Treaty, which guaranteed Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, and which Chiang hoped would condemn Japan and take positive steps to aid China. It had been called in October and began sitting on 3 November. Chiang believed it essential to demonstrate at Shanghai that China was still capable of fighting Japan; there would be little point for any of the Nine Power Treaty signatories, who included France, Britain and the USA, to aid China if its armies were about to collapse. But on 9 November Chiang had to bow to the inevitable. A failure to order a general withdrawal risked the loss of all remaining forces, some of which were close to collapse and even mutiny.36 The Battle of Shanghai was over. The best estimate of Japanese losses is 9,115 killed and 31,257 wounded, while Chinese casualties reached a staggering 187,000.37 The Brussels Conference was adjourned indefinitely on 24 November, declining to endorse intervention.
Bombing
The Japanese triumphed, not just at Shanghai but also in north China, where they occupied Nankou on 25 August and then rapidly thrust westwards, bringing the entire Beijing–Suiyuan railway under their control by early October. They also seized the northern section of the Tianjin–Pukou railway. On 8 November, one day before the Nationalists retreated from Shanghai, the Japan ese celebrated victory in the Battle of Taiyuan in Shanxi province, 400 kilometres inland, in north-west China.38 The Japanese had implemented their war plan almost exactly according to schedule. Their use of bombing, however, undermined successes on the battlefield. In the era of mass war, when public opinion mattered more than before, how a victory was achieved mattered.
Japanese bombing in China played into worldwide fears about mass bombing, much as atomic and nuclear bombs were to do during the Cold War. In the 1930s aerial bombing was still a fairly new weapon. In the First World War, planes had been used largely for reconnaissance purposes, although also for tac tical air support. Airships dropped bombs over London, causing little damage though much fright, provided a hint of what was to come. By the Second World War, aeroplanes were much faster and were able to carry large payloads of up to 500 kg, including incendiaries fitted with delay detonators. The Luftwaffe had just given a demonstration of the destruction bombing was able to wreak when it attacked the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937, which triggered mass protests in cities around Europe. Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s most famous painting, had only just been unveiled in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exhibition. Chiang Kaishek chose to make his stand at Shanghai, full of foreign diplomats, bankers, businessmen and journalists, not only for military reasons, nor just to have the war threaten their interests in China, but also ‘to make all countries furious with Japan’.39 The Japanese bombing of S
hanghai achieved exactly that.
Foreign journalists vied with each other to produce the most iconic account of the bombardment. Had a prize been on offer, New York Times journalist Hallett Abend’s description would have been in the running. When he heard what was happening, he rushed back from the north China front, travelling in overcrowded trains and ships to reach the city on 22 August. A chapter in his China memoir entitled ‘Terror and Death’ recalls how, after his arrival in Shanghai, he went to purchase a pair of binoculars at the Wing On department store. He stayed in his car while his assistant headed into the shop. After lighting a cigarette, Abend looked up and saw a silver streak:
Then it hit. There was a tremendous sickening lurch of the ground, accompanied by a shattering explosion so close that my eardrums and my windpipe seemed to be affected … The worst part of a bombing experience is that period of utter paralysis which follows the concussion. For as much as four minutes, if the bomb is a big one, nothing moves except swirling smoke and thick dust, and there is no sound except the continued tinkle of falling broken glass and the rumble of crumbling masonry. After about four minutes the wounded begin to moan and shriek and try to drag themselves away; then come the sounds of sirens and ambulances.40
Abend’s depiction of bombing, with its initial stillness followed by the quiet tinkle of falling glass giving way to growing noise, disorientation and panic, and ending with pandemonium, shaped later depictions of bombing, including in movies. When Abend lunched with Cecil B. DeMille in the autumn of 1942, the legendary Hollywood director quizzed him on ‘the immediate aftereffects of a bombing’.41 He was then directing ‘a picture based on the Japanese attack on Java’ – presumably The Story of Dr Wassell, released, coincidentally, on D-Day, which went on to receive an Oscar for its special effects. Its portrayal of bombing would become film cliché.
It was China’s air force that was responsible for Black Saturday, as well as for the bomb that nearly did for Abend and his assistant. Yet Japanese intransigence, rather than Chinese incompetence, was held responsible. The Japanese authorities in Shanghai declined a suggestion made by the British consul after the first raid on the Izumo in the morning but before the afternoon attack, that the ‘Japanese flagship and destroyer at naval buoys be withdrawn’.42 They also refused other suggestions aimed at reducing the chances of conflict, even those made by the wife of the US President, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in Shanghai at the time.43
Once Japan’s naval air force established its air supremacy, it bombed government buildings, bridges, barracks and railway stations in cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin, Canton, Hangzhou and Suzhou, with the inevitable consequences. Oriental Affairs, a Shanghai newspaper edited by the British China coast journalist Henry Woodhead, who looked back on the days of the Anglo-Japanese alliance with nostalgia, commented that ‘we have ocular evidence of what it means to bring war in its modern form into a city of over three million inhabitants’. He reported an ‘appalling list of civilian casualties from aeroplane bombs’ and commented that ‘the extensive use of aircraft has shown that even where military objectives are aimed at, the toll of non-combatants must reach alarming proportions’.44 Harold Timperley, a Manchester Guardian journalist, reported on hundreds and even thousands of civilian casualties resulting from Japanese raids on Nanjing, Shanghai and Canton.45 Frank Oliver, a journalist with the news agency Reuters, recorded that a Western diplomat in Nanjing, whom he did not identify, told him that one day ‘a hundred planes came over like flights of geese and bombs were dropped in almost every section of Nanking inside the city walls. Possibly the electric light plant was a military objective, possibly a small water pumping station near me (too damned near) was another. But what about the Central Hospital and the Nationalist Health Administration?’46 H. S. ‘Newsreel’ Wong, working for Hearst Metrotone News, produced the war’s most iconic photograph, of a wailing child sitting in torn clothes covered in soot amidst the wreckage of Shanghai’s bombed-out South Station.
For Chi Pang-yuan, too, the bombing brought home the horror of war. At night, as she lay in bed, the sirens warning of a coming raid sounded even more threatening than during the day. ‘Not long after the one long and a series of short blasts of the final warning of the air raid siren, I heard the low roar of the approaching airplanes. Then followed the explosions and flames from the bombs. Alone in bed, I heard the creaking of the fastenings of the window screen in the autumn wind. In my mind I saw the debris that had filled the sky fall back to earth, scattering on the endless steps of the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum, on the waves of Xuanwu Lake, on Dongchang Park, on the roses in front of the houses in Fuhou Street, and on the window shutters of the Drum Tower Elementary School. Death was at my window.’47 The outbreak of war, she wrote, ‘ended my youth’.48
For Chen Kewen, whose home was in the Nanjing suburbs, the Japanese bombing was initially no more than an inconvenience: his cook, gardener and rickshaw puller decamped for the safety of the countryside.49 Initially he took pride in the effectiveness of the Nationalist air force and Nanjing’s anti-aircraft guns.50 Because Japanese bombers targeted not just military but also cultural centres and government buildings, he too came to regard the Japanese as ‘barbaric’.51 The Japanese air raid on Canton, whose death toll was underreported in Nationalist newspapers so as not to cause panic, left him ‘speechless … although the whole world criticises the Japanese, they do nothing. We must rely on our own forces if we are to escape the Japanese menace.’52 Japanese bombing hardened the Chinese will to resist, alone if necessary.
There was similar outrage around the world. Lord Meston, president of the Liberal Party in the UK, ‘appealed to Liberals in all constituencies for the fullest support in condemning Japanese outrages’.53 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared at the Conservative Party conference that autumn that ‘non-combatants have been killed and mutilated by aerial weapons which, we are told, were aimed at military objectives, but which, in no case, can be considered instruments of precision. It is a sickening and horrifying spectacle from which the mind revolts.’54 John Rabe, an employee of the Germany engineering company Siemens, who would at the end of the year establish the Nanjing Safety Zone, was equally appalled.55 He appealed, without success, to Hitler to put pressure on Japan to stop the carnage. In India, the scholar Gulshan Rai wrote in the Civil and Military Gazette that Japanese militarism was a greater threat to India than British colonialism.56 The Leader of Allahabad professed that ‘all right thinking men throughout the civilised world will be with China and against the military gangsters in Japan who are seeking to rob it of its valuable territories and convert it to a vassal state’.57
These reactions in India, reported by German intelligence to Berlin, worried German Foreign Office officials, who did not want Japan to do anything that would strengthen Britain. One of these, Ernst von Weizsäcker, the father of the future president quoted in the introduction to this book, was deeply critical of Japan, arguing that its actions in China prevented the consolidation of the country under the Nationalists and played into the hands of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists.58 On 5 October, President Franklin Roosevelt famously called for a ‘quarantine of the aggressor nations’, not mentioned by name but understood to refer to Germany, Japan and Italy. The Soviet Union protested at Japan’s ‘bombing of Nanking’ and warned that Japan ‘would be held responsible for any consequences of these illegal acts’.59
The Japanese response to an attack in late August by a Japanese aeroplane on British ambassador Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen reinforced the association of Japan with barbarity, militarism and intransigence. Ambassador KnatchbullHugessen had been travelling from Nanjing to Shanghai in a car flying the British flag when a Japanese aeroplane first bombed and then strafed it, leaving the ambassador wounded, reportedly by a bullet that had passed through his chest and damaged his spine. The North China Herald published a photograph of Knatchbull-Hugessen slumped in the back of his car with blood spilling over its back seat and on to t
he floor. The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, rejected the Japanese excuse that Chiang Kaishek had been the target, although Chiang had indeed been on the road – evidence, as Chen Kewen noted, of the frightening truth that Japan had informants in the Nationalist government.60 Eden demanded a formal apology, the punishment of the perpetrators and a promise of better behaviour in the future. He called it an ‘outrage’ when the Japanese replied that ‘they may have been the ones who shot and bombed Knatchbull-Huggessen and therefore expressed their regret’.61 The famous opponent of appeasement this time judged it best to leave it at that.
The USS Panay Incident was to the US what the attack on KnatchbullHugessen was to the British. On 12 December, soon after Shanghai had fallen and Nanjing too had been taken, Japanese aircraft sunk the US gunboat even though it was flying the US ensign. The attack resulted in two people dead and ten seriously injured. In an interview with Hallett Abend, General Matsui blamed a Japanese colonel, a ‘publicity hound’ who was ‘ignorant, dangerous, and wants Japan to fight the world right now’.62 After taking a town on the Yangzi river upstream from Nanjing, this colonel had ‘ordered the planes to bomb everything that moved on the Yangtse’.63 Previously, Abend had been friendly with General Matsui and a touch pro-Japanese, but he changed his attitude during the Battle of Shanghai.64
Against this background of Japanese brutality, tales of Chinese heroism became desirable. Once retreat became inevitable, one battalion of the 88th Division was selected to occupy the Four Banks’ warehouse in the Zhabei district, right on the edge of the International Settlement, from where foreign journalists could observe and report on the Nationalists’ last stand. The battalion held out for four days as the Japanese pushed forwards with artillery and tanks, reinforcing the image of Japanese barbarity. Throughout the siege, the Nationalist flag flew defiantly from the warehouse in a sea of Japanese Rising Sun flags fluttering from the surrounding buildings, thus deflating the claims of a great victory by the Japanese. ‘Shanghai gasped with pleasure’, or so one jobbing journalist, Roads Farmer, reported from the city.65 The ‘Doomed Battalion’, as it was dubbed, was meant to impress not only foreigners. Chen Kewen, who read about it in Chinese newspapers, ‘was inspired, and moved to tears’.66 The British appealed to the Japanese to allow the battalion to withdraw to British lines on the opposite side of the Suzhou creek, but the Japanese refused. Instead they trained their machine guns on groups of soldiers as they dashed at irregular intervals over the bridge into the International Settlement.67
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