Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

320 Pages·2013·4.47 MB·English

by  Peter Harmsen

Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2013 by
CASEMATE PUBLISHERS
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Harmsen
ISBN 978-1-61200-167-8
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200168-5
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Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 THREE CORPSES
CHAPTER 2 “BLACK SATURDAY”
CHAPTER 3 FLESH AGAINST STEEL
CHAPTER 4 “BANZAI! BANZAI! BANZAI!”
CHAPTER 5 RIVERS OF BLOOD
CHAPTER 6 VERDUN OF THE EAST
CHAPTER 7 THE “LOST BATTALION”
CHAPTER 8 COLLAPSE
CHAPTER 9 AFTERMATH
ORDER OF BATTLE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Acknowledgments
NO ENDEAVOR IS A ONE-MAN UNDERTAKING. THIS ALSO GOES FOR Shanghai 1937.
The information needed to tell the untold story of the great battle on the banks of
the Yangtze had to come from numerous sources, some less obvious than others. I
have depended on the help of acquaintances, and the occasional kindness of
strangers, without whom this book would never have made it into print.
I wish to acknowledge the following institutions for their generous assistance:
Academia Historica, Taipei; the National Central Library, Taipei; the Department
Military Archives, Freiburg im Breisgau; and Columbia Center for Oral History.
The willingness of the Asahi Shimbun Photo Archives and of the American
Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, to
share their rich and unique holdings of historical images was essential in putting
together a pictorial record of the momentous events described in this book.
Among individuals who have contributed, I would particularly like to mention
Kashiwagi Kazuhiko, editor at Asahi Shimbun Photo Archives, and Fang Jun, a
Beijing-based amateur historian who shows by his own personal example that the
memory of the Sino-Japanese War is very much alive in China today. Thanks
should also go to my colleague Sam Yeh in the Taipei office of the French news
agency AFP for his help in giving this book an Internet presence.
I am extremely grateful for the help provided by the staff at Casemate
Publishers, including editorial director Steven Smith, for his enthusiastic support
during the entire process of preparing this publication; designer Libby Braden for
ensuring that the book ended up as visually appealing as it did; and editor Anita
Baker for polishing the manuscript with a keen eye for both the big picture and the
small, but important, detail.
The patience of my wife Hui-tsung was crucial. Finally, thanks to my children,
Eva and Lisa, for putting up with all the evenings and weekends Dad had to spend
in front of the computer.
TAIPEI, FEBRUARY 2013
Prologue
IN THE EARLY PART OF 1937, THE CONCEPT OF URBAN WARFARE WAS still new to the
world. Three months of battle in Shanghai in the fall of that year changed all that.
The struggle between China and Japan demonstrated what happens to a major city
when it becomes the arena for two vast armies, fielding hundreds of thousands of
men and an array of destructive weapons. There had been other instances of war in
an urban setting—indeed, earlier in the decade Shanghai was an example of that—
but never on such a massive scale. The scenes of flattened housing complexes and
gutted factories that were later to captivate and horrify the global public during the
battle of Stalingrad had in fact already been played out more than five years earlier
in China’s largest city.
In a sense, the struggle for Shanghai in 1937 was a dress rehearsal for World
War II. Or more correctly, perhaps, it was part of World War II. Arguably, it could
be considered to be the first major battle in a conflict that divided mankind into
two major camps—one consisting of Fascist regimes in various guises, the other a
motley group of democratic and totalitarian nations. To westerners it is natural to
see World War II as starting in earnest with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.
For Asians, it is just as logical to think of it as beginning two years earlier on the
north Chinese plain and along the banks of the Yangtze.
Even if the battle of Shanghai is considered isolated from the larger context of
World War II, it was undeniably an event that would leave an indelible mark on the
two ancient civilizations caught up in it. It was the biggest clash between nations
that East Asia had seen since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905.1 It turned
localized, and possibly manageable, Sino-Japanese friction into a full-scale war that
would continue for eight bloody years. In fact neither side, Chinese or Japanese, has
ever really found closure, and to this day, nearly 80 years later, they remain locked
in mutual suspicion. Much of this is due to the appalling brutality exhibited by the
Japanese Army in China, which was epitomized in the infamous Rape of Nanjing—
a direct result of the Shanghai campaign.
Shanghai was Asia’s most cosmopolitan city and home to citizens from a range
of nations, as well as a large number of stateless people. Although they lived in areas
left mostly untouched by combat, they were often just yards away from scenes of
carnage where men and women fought and died in their thousands. These foreign
inhabitants became the unwilling witnesses of the battle that raged all around them,
and in that way they helped write history themselves. Rarely before had so many
civilians seen so much bloodshed at such close range. The analogy would have been
if a district of Stalingrad had miraculously been left unharmed by the battle,
allowing the residents to take in all of the fighting that devoured the rest of the city.
Or, in the words of American correspondent Edgar Snow: “It was as though
Verdun had happened on the Seine, in full view of a Right Bank Paris that was
neutral; as though a Gettysburg were fought in Harlem, while the rest of Manhattan
remained a non-belligerent observer.”2
Verdun and Gettysburg are apt comparisons. These battles had been
momentous events, and the battle that consumed the Yangtze River delta in the
latter half of 1937 was, too. The rest of the world understood this and the fighting
regularly occupied the front pages of major newspapers around the globe. Shanghai
seized the imagination then for much the same reasons as it does so again today. It
was a place of excitement and exotic adventure, and the public wanted to be
informed when its fate was hanging in the balance.
Therefore, it is ironic that so little has been written in any language other than
Chinese about the battle of Shanghai in past decades. Not a single monograph on
this crucial encounter is listed among the hundreds of thousands of volumes dealing
with World War II and its antecedents. In a time when academic and popular
writers must use all their imaginative powers to think up uncovered angles on the
war in Europe and the Pacific, the battle of Shanghai and many other battles of the
1937—1945 Sino-Japanese War constitute a gaping hole in the historiography. It is
my hope that this book can make a modest contribution towards rectifying this
imbalance.
————————
In what follows, almost all Chinese names are spelled using the pinyin system of
transliteration introduced in China after 1949 and now increasingly adopted
elsewhere. Traditional spelling has only been kept in a few instances where the use
of pinyin would confuse rather than enlighten. China’s supreme leader is referred to
as Chiang Kai-shek rather than Jiang Jieshi. In addition, in bibliographical
references, authors’ spellings of their own names are maintained, even if they do not
follow the conventions for the use of pinyin, for example, Hsin Ta-mo instead of
Xin Damo.
Geographical names are generally given in their modern rendering rather than
the way they were described in 1937, e.g. Beijing instead of Beiping and Taiwan
instead of Formosa. Here, too, exceptions have been allowed for the sake of clarity.
Manchukuo is not spelled Manzhouguo, and Marco Polo Bridge is not called
Lugou Bridge.
It is generally the custom to give the full names of Chinese persons in the first
reference, and later refer to them by their family names only. I have frequently
departed from this convention so that it is possible to make the necessary
distinctions between people with the same family names, e.g. Zhang Zhizhong and
Zhang Fakui, who were both pivotal commanders. My aim is also to make it easier
for the reader to commit the often unfamiliar names to memory. For Japanese
persons, family names are put before given names.

CHAPTER
1