Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (16 page)

Chiang then issued the challenge in terms that were hard to turn down. “So, comrades, we need a decision. Do we fight, or shall we be destroyed?” Chiang may have been looking in the direction of the next speaker: Wang Jingwei. But Wang did not speak up in favor of peace. Despite his supposedly pro-Japanese reputation, he had always advocated a strong, independent China. Now, whether under pressure or out of conviction, he supported the war. Wang agreed that “China had come to a crisis point. Only through war can we seek survival; there’s no possibility of a conditional peace.” Wang then advocated the acceleration of military production, and echoed Chiang’s thoughts on the contrast between the two sides: “Let us not worry about material losses. The spiritual effects will last forever.” Wang was followed by Zhang Boquan, who echoed this sentiment. “This war is a symbol of civilization and progress,” he said. “On the surface, it’s destruction, but its significance is for a new, progressive reconstruction.”
⁴⁸

Chiang had the room right where he wanted it. But he was not done yet. With characteristic moral fervor, he now proceeded to tell China’s government how hard the task before them was, and how far they fell short:

Compared with the Japanese level of preparation, it’s not that we are not 10 percent as prepared, we’re not even 1 percent as prepared. No wonder the general population is panicking . . . All generals and officials must face up to their responsibilities.

Chiang gave specifics: official reports were claiming that air-raid shelters in Nanjing were close to completion, yet an aerial inspection suggested that nine out of ten were in fact exposed and vulnerable to attack. “From the air-raid shelters,” he scolded, “you can infer how other things have been done.” Another example was the evacuation of bureaucrats’ families from Nanjing; instead of being carried out in an orderly fashion, there was such chaos that the railway stations were jammed solid with people. Instead, the leaders should look at their enemy, the Japanese, and see how their “discipline” had helped them prepare for war. Furthermore, there would be problems of implementation; it was all very well to order people to build defensive walls or use sandbags, but were there the financial resources to supply the materials for these defenses? Chiang used a phrase—
shishi qiushi
—“seek truth from facts”—that would later be associated with the two most powerful Communist figures of the century, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. But the meaning was clear: the war could only be won if people paid attention to the situation on the ground, as opposed to sending out meaningless orders or reams of paperwork. “That’s it,” Chiang snapped, as he ended his diatribe.
⁴⁹

At the end of the meeting, those who favored war were told to stand up. Among those who stood were Liu Xiang, military commander of Sichuan province in the west of China, which would within months become the center of China’s resistance. Liu had offered troops from his native province, declaring that over 5 million of them could be conscripted within two years. Also standing was Yan Xishan, another bitter military rival of Chiang, but one who now accepted his arguments that the war must come. And then there was Wang Jingwei, the man who had for so long tried to keep China out of a conflict with Japan.
⁵⁰
He too voted for war. In fact, everyone stood up. In truth, it would have been hard not to.

The next few days saw frantic military preparations. Chiang had finally abandoned any hope that the conflict in north China might be contained, and peace restored. His own best troops were located in central China, under the control of his government in Nanjing. It was time to take the war to the Japanese, and in a place of Chiang’s choosing: the great port city of Shanghai.

Chapter 5

The Battle for Shanghai

I
N LATE OCTOBER
1937 all of Shanghai’s inhabitants, Chinese and foreign alike, looked out on a city transformed. Within the space of three months, China’s most open, lively, and cosmopolitan center had been turned into a charnel house. A report of October 28 described the scene:

Stunned Shanghai watched with shocked horror yesterday the awful aftermath of hostilities in Chapei, appalled as fire after fire broke out, from before dawn all through the day, until the whole of its northern Chinese city was wrapped in flame. Numbed crowds gazed upwards at the four-mile-long cliff of smoke, towering many thousands of feet into the air and drifting in the light southerly wind, throwing its gloomy pall over the countryside as far as Woosung, and beyond over the Yangtze River where Japan’s mighty fleet lies concentrated.
¹

It had been clear for weeks that both China and Japan were squaring up for a war in central China. The Japanese had been diverting naval troops from the north to boost their numbers in Shanghai, and by early August they had assembled over 8,000 troops. A few days later, some thirty-two naval vessels had arrived. On July 31 Chiang declared that “all hope for peace has been lost.”
²
Chiang had been reluctant to commit his best forces to defend north China, an area that he had never truly controlled; Shanghai, on the other hand, was central to his strategy for the war against Japan. Chiang would use his very best troops, the 87th and 88th Divisions, units trained by generals advised by the German von Falkenhausen, who had high hopes that they would do well against the Japanese. In doing so, Chiang would show his own people and the wider world that the Chinese could—and would—resist the invader.

Chiang had not taken the decision to open a new front in Shanghai lightly. Built on two banks of the Huangpu River, the city was the junction between the Pacific Ocean to the east and the great Yangtze River that wound thousands of kilometers inland to the west. Shanghai was a distillation of everything that made China modern, from industry, to labor relations, to connections with the outside world. And although foreign diplomatic presence was concentrated in nearby Nanjing, the capital, it was in Shanghai that the foreign community took the country’s temperature. Foreigners in the city’s two “concession” areas—the French Concession and the British-affiliated International Settlement—often dismissed towns beyond Shanghai as mere “outstations.”

On August 13, 1937, Chiang Kai-shek gave orders to his armies to defend Shanghai: “divert the enemy in the sea, block off the coast, and resist landings.”
³
Even before Chiang had mobilized troops, panic had hit Shanghai. The iconic photograph of that period, taken by the journalist Randall Gould, shows refugees in uncountable numbers crossing the Garden Bridge in the hope of being admitted into the foreign areas of safety. On August 6 the
North China Daily News
, the voice of the British community in Shanghai, reported the influx:

. . . the exodus from Chapei and Hongkew reached alarming proportions on Aug. 5 when thousands of people streamed into the Settlement and the French Concession with their belongings throughout the day . . . So heavy was the traffic at every bridge along the Creek that motor cars had to crawl for some distance before being able to get through . . . a conservative estimate put the number of refugees [between July 26 and August 5] at 50,000.
⁴

The foreign community did not welcome its new guests. Another commentator in the same paper fussed about the unwillingness of the Chinese to accept their inevitable fate without inconveniencing others: “The responsible authorities will, it is hoped, take measures to stem the apparently quite unnecessary and highly dangerous exodus [of Chinese refugees].” It added forlornly, “The admirable co-operation of the local Chinese and Japanese authorities has so far succeeded in preserving calmness and an absence of panic in Shanghai.”
⁵
Still, the appearance of the city’s waterfront became ever more menacing: “Arms, ammunition, and supplies poured out of a number of Japanese cruisers and destroyers yesterday afternoon onto the O.S.K. wharf in an apparently unending stream . . . In addition, a large detachment of men, in full marching kit, tramped ashore . . . A cruiser, the Idzumo [
Izumo
], two destroyers, and nine gunboats arrived here a short while ago.”
⁶
A week later, the headline to an editorial asked the question that occupied the foreign community most: “
WILL SANITY WIN
?”
⁷

One terrible event would shatter the illusion that calm might be restored. The Nationalist military command decided to knock out one of the greatest Japanese naval assets in Shanghai and bomb the
Izumo
, harbored with support craft on the Huangpu River in the center of the city. On Saturday, August 14, the atmosphere in the center of Shanghai was already anxious; a public health official recorded at 1:45 p.m. that day, “Refugees streaming up Nanking Rd. from the East! Shops closed and barred!”
⁸
That afternoon, bombers of the Chinese air force set out from airfields in the Yangtze delta toward Shanghai, targeting the Japanese ship. But for two of the pilots, something went very wrong. “From one of the four monoplanes making up the rear four aerial torpedoes were seen to drop as the planes passed over the Bund far from their apparent objective . . . Two others fell in Nanking Road.”
⁹
Either the pilot had misjudged his target, or else there was a problem with the release mechanism. Whatever the reason, the bombs had fallen on one of the busiest civilian areas in the whole city, where thousands of people were walking, shopping, and strolling on a hot August Saturday. At 4:46 p.m. the public health department’s work diary recorded “Palace Hotel hit!—many injured and dead in street!—Nanking Road opposite Cathay Hotel.”
¹⁰
A reporter captured the horror of the scene:

A bomb curved through the air, struck the Palace Hotel a glancing blow and dealt carnage indescribable. A scene of dreadful death was uncovered as the high explosive fumes slowly lifted. Flames from a blazing car played over distorted bodies. In shapeless heaps where they had been huddling in shelter bodies in coolie cloth turning scarlet lay piled up in the entrances to the main doorways and arcades of the Palace and Cathay hotels. Heads, legs, arms lay far from smashed masses of flesh . . . Dead in his tracks as he had been directing the corner traffic lay the corpse of a Chinese policeman with shrapnel through his head. A disembowelled child was nearby.
¹¹

To make matters worse, another pilot had released his weapon over the Avenue Edward VII, another major shopping street. When the numbers were tallied, over 1,000 people had been killed, Chinese and foreigners alike. The bombs had hit the International Settlement, politically neutral and supposedly safe.

Although the
Izumo
did sustain damage, the incompetence of “Black Saturday” could not have come at a worse time for the Nationalists, who needed to rally public support for their cause at home and abroad. In addition, Chiang’s forces had lost the element of surprise. Now, as August drew on, both sides began to dig in for battle—literally so, as trenches were formed in the streets. Chinese troops under some of the major commanders, including Hu Zongnan and Chen Cheng, were moved toward Shanghai. The Japanese responded; by early September some 100,000 troops had been moved in from north China and even from as far as Taiwan (at that time a Japanese colony).

Meanwhile, Shanghai society responded to the sudden outbreak of war. In July the city’s residents worked, ate, drank, and played as they had done for decades. Beginning in August, they had to remake their entire lives. Local institutions started to relocate; in late September it was announced that four local universities would open joint colleges with institutions in China’s interior.
¹²
In the country’s premier commercial city, business was being destroyed: “Like a nightmare octopus flinging cruel tentacles around its helpless victims,” the
North-China Daily News
reported, “the local hostilities are slowly strangling Shanghai’s trade.” A shopkeeper lamented: “We obtain a lot of business, of course, from tourists who visit Shanghai. What tourists are there these days?”
¹³

Attempts to capture the city street by street led to intense fighting, with massive aerial bombing by the Japanese to wear down resistance. From the beginning, Chiang knew that the city’s fate was part of a wider set of calculations and gambles. In his diary for September 14 he asked: “Are we gathering our forces for a decisive battle at Shanghai?”
¹⁴
Already, just a couple of months into the war, Chiang was preparing himself—and his party and people—for the likelihood that the war would not be over in weeks or even months, but years. This view was still not shared by the Japanese, at least not officially. They continued to regard the events in north China and Shanghai as “incidents” that had flared up and would be damped down with a firm hand.

But Chiang’s purpose in opening up the Shanghai front was to make it clear that the two battles were part of the same conflict. Chiang knew there was a high chance of losing Shanghai. Von Falkenhausen had advised him that the crowded streets of the city were less favorable territory for the Japanese than the open plains of northern China, and that there was a reasonable chance of success. Nonetheless, Chiang’s German-trained troops, however good, were limited in number, and large proportions of the Nationalist Army were under the control of generals who were only occasionally reliable allies, such as Li Zongren, leader of the military clique based in the southwestern province of Guangxi. As a precaution, there had been plans in place since 1932 to move the government and industrial production into the interior, in case of foreign occupation of the eastern seaboard.
¹⁵