Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze Read online

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  In the fall of 1937, Shanghai was on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. The battle was the most dramatic manifestation yet of Japan’s aggressive imperialist ambitions and the public wanted to know more. At the same time, convenience entered the picture. This was not a distant battlefield, reached by aventurous reporters at overwhelming personal hazard, but one of the great cities of the world. Foreign correspondents were already present in great numbers, or could easily sail in from places like Tokyo and Manila. They could report on the progress of the war at the same time as they enjoyed the relative luxury of Shanghai’s five-star hotels, which continued to operate as before despite the war on their doorsteps.

  Journalists and photographers enjoyed an unprecedented freedom of movement. In the early stages of the battle, when fighting was confined to the municipal area, they could easily cover both sides of the story within a single day. First thing in the morning they could visit the Japanese positions, take a detour and then arrive at the Chinese side of the front. Once they had what they needed they could return to the neutral territory of the International Settlement and file their stories without having to worry about being censored by anyone.38

  Later, as the war moved to the outskirts of Shanghai, the Japanese restricted coverage by foreign journalists, but access was as uninhibited as ever on the Chinese side. The services of a modern transportation system made the urban battlefront even more accessible to inquisitive correspondents. When the battle was reaching its climax, Erik Nystrom, a Swedish correspondent, used a press conference to ask the Shanghai mayor where the front was. “The end of our line is just west of the railway, beyond Jess-field Park,” the mayor said. “Umm, I tank I yust take the Yessfield buss out to the front tomorrow,” the Swede said, seeing no reason to waste money on expensive transportation.39

  The Chinese and, despite the restrictions they imposed, the Japanese both understood the value of propaganda and tried their best to project their respective views to the world public. They both held daily press conferences, helpfully spaced out so correspondents who were covering the story on their own did not have to miss out on anything. Even so, most foreign journalists had a clear preference for the Chinese. This partly came down to the fact that they were mostly members of China’s foreign press corps, and, as is often the case with correspondents, had gradually come to sympathize or even identify with the country they were reporting from. At a more fundamental human level, it was also a reflection of the pity they felt for the young Chinese republic as it was being victimized by naked Japanese aggression.

  This made for a tense atmosphere at the daily news conferences carried out by the Japanese military, despite a generous offering of drinks ranging from coffee and tea to beer and whiskey. One army representative, and one from the navy, would deliver the day’s briefing in Japanese, with the translator “Bob” Horiguchi providing a perfect rendering in idiomatic American English. After that it would be time for questions at which time the anglophone correspondents and especially the Americans, perhaps emboldened by the free flow of liquor, would delight in asking impossible questions, setting off a to and fro of scathing remarks.40

  As the novelty of the battle rubbed off, reporters working for local media found that their audience in the International Settlement lost some of their interest in the fighting over hamlets in the countryside near Shanghai and wanted to be entertained with the usual journalism fare of true crime and celebrity scandals. This required a certain degree of versatility. Carroll Alcott, an American journalist with years of experience in Asia, remembered witnessing a major battle between Chinese and Japanese soldiers, followed by a walk through streets littered with gore after an air attack. He ended the day covering a court case against a gang of jewelry thieves led by a dubious character known as Hatchet-Face Rosie.41

  However, for the vast majority of reporters present in Shanghai, it was the epic battle that mattered. Journalistic careers were founded in the rubble of the city and the trenches of the suburbs. Eyewitness accounts straight from the frontline were at a premium. Descriptions of how a journalist himself had narrowly escaped death to bring his story to the readers were likely to reach a wider audience. Yet, despite the stiff competition for scoops, the journalists seemed to live charmed lives. No one from the neutral media lost his or her life while reporting from the frontline for the entire first three months of battle. This was a remarkable record that was to stay unchanged until the very last day of hostilities in the city.42

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  Kuse Hisao’s company, part of the Japanese Army’s 9th Infantry Division, was roused before dawn and started the march to the frontline at 6:00 a.m. on October 13. The mood was dejected as the column trudged down muddy paths, softened by days of incessant rain. The soldiers passed a spot where, so they muttered to each other, an entire Japanese battalion had been wiped out in a night attack. Their own mission could end up equally as deadly. There were to take part in yet another attack on the town of Chenjiahang, located just north of Wusong Creek. It was an important and heavily defended stronghold that obstructed the southward advance of the Japanese Army. The Chinese would hold onto the village fanatically, like they did any other fortified village. It would become bloody.43

  When Kuse Hisao’s unit had almost reached the front, the soldiers were told to rest. Chenjiahang was somewhere in the distance, behind tall cotton fields. The order to attack came at 1:00 p.m. The Japanese artillery started exactly at the arranged minute. The Chinese artillery answered in kind, but with much greater force. It was an unpleasant surprise for the Japanese to be so heavily outgunned, but the assault went ahead nonetheless. Wave after wave of attackers marched off obediently, disappearing into the cotton fields. The plants offered some cover, but not enough. The Chinese defenders fired from invisible positions, especially aiming at the machine gunners, who were always the first to be targeted because of their firepower. One was shot through the thigh, while another received a wound to the face.

  The Chinese fire grew so dense that it was almost impossible for the Japanese to move. Kuse Hisao’s platoon slowly crawled forward across the field, through the sticky mud created by the downpour of the recent days. Over the noise of weapons being fired, the wailing of the injured could be heard, but it gradually became weaker. Kuse Hisao was relieved when he reached a small creek, rolling down the slope in the hope of gaining cover from the fire there. However, his relief turned to horror when he discovered the water was filled with Japanese and Chinese corpses in various stages of decomposition.

  The attack on Chenjiahang had bogged down, and Kuse Hisao and his platoon spent the night in the dreary company of the dead soldiers. The following day the order arrived for two neighboring platoons to renew the attack. Kuse Hisao’s platoon was kept in reserve, but the day’s battle was no more successful than the previous day’s, and when it was almost dark, they too were ordered to advance. Like the previous day, they moved by crawling across the field. They passed the bodies of several soldiers from the two other platoons, who had been killed and lay in pools of blood. Eventually, they reached another creek. Barbed wire was rolled out along the bank, and engineers were busy removing it, keeping as low as they could. On the other side, behind a bamboo grove, they were told, was Chenjiahang.

  The sun had already set, and Kuse Hisao was crouching in the dark, waiting for orders about what to do next. Suddenly, a huge white flame lit up the night. The engineers had brought a flamethrower, the most dreaded weapon of the Japanese Army, and had crossed the creek. The bamboo grove on the other side was ablaze. “Attack!” someone shouted. They jumped into the waist-deep water, waded across, and grabbed branches of bamboo trees to haul themselves onto the other bank. Quickly scaling the slope, they found themselves in a maze of Chinese trenches, which were apparently deserted. They took a quick break, triumphant and relieved at the same time. They had occupied a corner of Chenjiahang, without even firing a shot.

 
It was a brief pause, interrupted when Kuse Hisao heard lowered voices. They were not speaking Japanese. A split second later, a German-style stick hand grenade was lobbed into his trench. The next thing Kuse Hisao remembered was gradually emerging from a daze, with a humming sound in his ears. He felt a sharp pain in his eyes, and he was unable to open them. He was grateful to be alive but he expected the trench to be overrun and that he would be killed any moment. However, the Chinese attack did not come. Kuse Hisao spent the night, helpless and blinded, until dawn finally broke and friendly hands carried him back to the rear.44

  Few would have been able to place Chenjiahang on a map before the war, but for several weeks, beginning in early October, the Chinese and the Japanese fought bitterly over its increasingly devastated streets. Along with Yanghang, Chenjiahang was considered one of the two key points that the Japanese absolutely needed to control in order to be able to move south towards Dachang. They would do anything to take Chenjiahang, and the Chinese would do anything to keep it. The see-saw battle over the town continued even long after Japanese troops had managed to break through the Wusong Creek barrier elsewhere along the front.45

  The Chinese commanders hurled a large number of their available troops into the Chenjiahang sector to prevent a collapse. These troops included units newly arrived from the Chinese provinces. In the early part of October, they deployed two divisions from the southwestern province of Sichuan. These divisions did not command much respect among the German advisors who deemed that insufficient training and equipment rendered them incapable of carrying out divisional-level operations in the field and concluded that they were best deployed in a regimental fashion to relieve burnt-out troops.46

  The Sichuan troops were pulled out again when in the middle of the month four fresh divisions arrived from Guangxi, a province in southern China. The Chinese field commanders were eager to use the new troops, easily recognizable in their light brown uniforms and their British-style “tin hat” helmets, and they sent one of the four, the 173rd Guangxi Division, straight to Chenjiahang. Ordered to march on the evening of October 15, the division arrived before dawn the following day, to take over positions held by another division that had suffered severe attrition and needed to withdraw to the rear.47

  While the handover of the positions was still taking place, the Japanese, who had detected the movement along the Chinese front, launched an intense air and artillery attack, causing serious casualties in the 173rd Division’s ranks before it had even properly deployed. Later the same day, when one of the division’s regiments was sent to engage the Japanese, it was slaughtered on the spot. By nightfall, two thirds of its soldiers had become casualties. The battle went on for the next four days, and gradually the three other Guangxi divisions also moved to the front. There was no breakthrough on either side, only desperate fighting over the same few inches of soil. “I had heard the expression ‘storm of steel’ before, but never really understood what it meant,” said a Guangxi officer. “Now I do.”48

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  By mid-October, Matsui’s initial optimism about his push south had shifted to weariness. The rain had already lasted for more than a week and had become a particular concern. It slowed down operations at all levels. The supplies took longer to reach the front, and the troops were unable to advance fast enough, if they were able to advance at all. He had received unconfirmed intelligence that senior Chinese commanders had moved from Suzhou to Nanxiang or even Shanghai proper. He had no idea if the reports were true, but they gave him food for thought. If the Chinese commanders were moving closer to the front, it meant that they were not about to abandon Shanghai. “It’s obvious that earlier views that the Chinese front was shaken had been premature,” he wrote in his diary. “Now is definitely not the time to rashly push the offensive.”49

  The poor weather caused Matsui to repeatedly postpone a major shock attack to punch a hole through the Chinese defenses, which had been planned for some time. However, the rain also had its benefits. The pause in the fighting was a relief for exhausted soldiers on both sides. The Chinese got rest, but so did the Japanese, and in addition the Japanese were given precious time to gradually dig their way closer to the Chinese lines. The next time they charged across no-man’s-land, the stretch of open field where they would be exposed to murderous Chinese fire would be a little shorter. The Japanese artillery had also finally reached the front in significant numbers, after being delayed for days on roads transformed into mud pools by the pouring rain. Nevertheless, the batteries were still using their shells sparingly, saving their ammunition for later. Their plan was to pulverize the Chinese strongholds one after the other, once the time had come.50

  It was getting colder, and a parcel of warm clothes that Matsui had arranged to be sent to him from Tokyo the month before still had not reached him. At least winter uniforms had arrived for the 3rd and 11th Divisions. They needed all the encouragement they could get. The soldiers in the frontline had seen heavy attrition in recent weeks, and reinforcements had not been able to fully make up for that. The 3rd Division, for example, had taken more than 6,000 casualties, many of whom were from the division’s backbone of experienced officers and NCOs. Therefore, even though the division had received 6,500 new men as replacements, and thus on paper looked like it had been more than replenished, this was not really the case. Matsui estimated that its combat strength had decreased to about one sixth of the original level.51

  Adversity was unavoidable in battle, and Matsui had great affection for the common soldiers who tried to keep a cheerful attitude despite all their trials. This made the unnecessary hardships caused by incompetence at the senior levels difficult for him to stomach. Matsui was dissatisfied with the work the officers had done before the advance south. Supply was a huge problem, mainly because they had not taken into account the possibilities for transportation by boat offered by the extensive creek and canal system. This was how the Chinese had moved goods around for centuries, if not millennia. The Japanese could do the same. In fact they had been doing the same since September further north bringing supplies from the Yangtze River to the troops fighting near Luodian. A little extra forethought, Matsui thought, and a significant amount of trouble could have been avoided.52

  On October 19, Matsui received the first reports that soldiers from Guangxi had arrived in the Shanghai area and were deployed around Wusong Creek. Despite all the reinforcements that he himself had received in recent weeks, there was no denying that Matsui faced a formidable foe, capable of pouring new troops into this theater more or less indefinitely. Deception was necessary to make up for the imbalance. To relieve pressure on the front, the Japanese Navy sent a mock invasion force up the Yangtze on a major three-day diversionary mission. The fleet, consisting of eight destroyers and more than 20 transport vessels carrying smaller landing craft, anchored ten miles upriver from Chuanshakou. They then subjected the surrounding area to intensive bombardment as if in preparation for a landing. There had been other maneuvers like this, but this was the first to also entail actual live fire against targets inland. “It’s sure to have a visible effect,” Matsui wrote in his diary.53

  Politics was never far below the surface during the battle of Shanghai. Much of what happened in and around the city was really meant for an international audience. The intelligence about the Guangxi troops arrived at Matsui’s headquarters along with other information suggesting that the Chinese were strengthening their defenses further south. This indicated they were preparing to keep fighting for Shanghai even if the lines at Wusong Creek were breached. It followed a military logic, but diplomatic motives probably weighed just as heavily. An international conference on the war was approaching, scheduled to take place in Brussels. Chiang Kai-shek needed to keep his presence in the only Chinese city most foreigners were likely to have ever heard about.54

  The battle for world public opinion was waged on several fronts. One topic bound to have a particular impact was poisonous gas. Less than two deca
des after the end of the Great War, it stood as the ultimate horror of modern warfare. Anyone caught using it would immediately be typecast in the role of the villain in the newspapers’ narratives. On October 14, China filed a complaint at the League of Nations accusing Japan of using gas on the Shanghai front. It said a total of 45 Chinese soldiers had fallen victim in two separate attacks that same month.55

  Whether the Japanese actually did use gas in the Shanghai area was a matter of debate, and remained so in the years after the battle. Zhang Fakui, the Chinese commander in Pudong, was not aware of any instances of Japanese deployment of the weapon.56 In some cases, the extreme awareness of the risks posed by gas warfare caused soldiers to suspect gas attacks even when something much less sinister was actually taking place. During an attack against Japanese positions south of Wusong Creek, Chinese soldiers mistook a Japanese smoke grenade for a shell containing poison gas.57 It is also possible that the Japanese used non-lethal gas to temporarily incapacitate their enemies leaving them vulnerable to attack. Not that it really mattered if the gas was of the lethal sort or not, since the end result would be the same: death to the Chinese.58

  According to the Japanese, the Chinese also resorted to gas on several occasions during the course of the battle for Shanghai. One of the times they accused them of utilizing it was during the bitter struggle over Chenjiahang, and they published photos meant to sway the public at home and abroad in their favor.59 Earlier in the campaign they had also claimed that China had been using sneezing gas, a chemical adopted by belligerents in the Great War. Shanghai’s mayor Yu Hongjun, a favorite among reporters for his quotable one-liners, replied promptly: ‘The Japanese sneeze because they’ve got cold feet.”60