Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (17 page)

However, bringing the war to Shanghai was important both for domestic and international political reasons. Despite the appalling performance of its bomber pilots, the Central Army had thrown itself fully into the defense of Shanghai. The era of avoiding military confrontation and political concessions was over. The decision to attack the Japanese in Shanghai also drove home that this was now a national war. Up to that point, it had been possible to argue that Manchuria was a separate issue from Chinese sovereignty as a whole—there was plenty of rhetoric but little action. The Chinese exiles from Manchuria had become deeply frustrated at their inability to force the issue of the recapture of the northeastern provinces.
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Even north China, around Beiping, felt remote when viewed from the populous Yangtze delta, where Shanghai lies. The Japanese also had a vested interest in fueling the idea that China was not one entity, but a patchwork of regimes, referring to the conflict not as a war but as a “North China incident.” They would maintain this strategy of division throughout the war, sponsoring a variety of client Chinese regimes, many at odds with one another. Now Chiang made it clear that an attack on north China would mean retaliation in the south, and that the country was engaged in one “war of resistance to the end”
(Kangzhan daodi)
, a phrase that quickly came to define the conflict, and remains in use even today.

By bringing the war to Shanghai, Chiang forced the world to take notice. Clashes in north China could be seen as part of the wild activity in the “outstations,” a very long way from Shanghai’s foreign concessions. Chiang’s great hope was to gain foreign cooperation for the war: in his diary he wrote that he hoped “every country would be angry at the enemy, and . . . encourage the US and Britain to take part in the war along with the USSR.”
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On September 12 Song Meiling made a radio address to the US in which she lambasted the West for its unwillingness to support the Chinese cause: “If the whole Occidental world is indifferent to this and abandons its treaties . . . we in China, who have labored for years under the stigma of cowards, will do our best.”
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The League of Nations, which had shown itself so supine in the face of the occupation of Manchuria in 1933, again offered words instead of concrete assistance, unanimously adopting a resolution condemning the open bombing of Chinese towns by the Japanese. There was especial poignancy about one particular expression of support. The foreign minister of Spain, another country whose government was fighting to survive and which had found liberal internationalism a weak reed, declared: “Spain sends the great Chinese people the warmest expression of their solidarity.”
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Among foreign powers there was also an early, if grudging realization, that the resistance to Japan was a sign of Chinese determination, even when it seemed at times that it might be more realistic to seek negotiations with Japan. The British diplomat Robert Howe noted, “The difficulty which I found in Nanking was that no one in authority appeared to be able or willing to formulate terms which would serve as a basis for approach to Japanese either for an armistice or peace.”
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On November 27 Howe went on to say that “unwillingness to surrender is practically confined to the military and intelligentsia, whilst the agricultural and mercantile mass of population are apathetic and would welcome peace on almost any terms.”
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It was Chiang’s challenge to change this view, both among his own people and in the eyes of the world.

Chiang used Shanghai as a challenge to his militarist rivals. They all billed themselves as patriots, but would they actually provide troops to defend China? In many cases, the answer was “yes”: Cantonese general Xue Yue and Sichuanese general Liu Xiang were two of the most prominent regional commanders to send troops, supplementing Nationalist generals directly loyal to Chiang who commanded sections of the Central Army, such as Hu Zongnan and Chen Cheng. Military leaders who would not previously have favored sending troops outside their areas of control were now operating, however sporadically, on a national scale. In the last weeks of the fighting in Shanghai, more than 200,000 Chinese soldiers from all parts of southern and central China fought there.
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The process of unification that had eluded Chiang for so long in times of relative peace was, ironically, being patchily strengthened by the war.

The assault on Shanghai had also enabled Chiang to move ahead with his only successful attempt to gain support from a foreign power: that surprising ally, the Soviet Union. Having saved Chiang Kai-shek during the Xi’an Incident, the Soviets now had a strong interest in keeping China engaged in a war with Japan. Now the situation in Shanghai made it clear to the rest of the world that Japan was a real threat to global peace. On August 1 the Soviet ambassador to China, Dmitri Bogomolov, agreed to a mutual nonaggression pact with the Nationalist government. In fact, it involved more active assistance than the term “nonaggression” implied: by mid-1938 the Soviets had supplied nearly 300 military aircraft, along with ammunition and aid of some 250 million US dollars.
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Despite his anticommunism, Chiang was now dependent on Moscow for his survival, an irony not lost on his old rival Wang Jingwei. Chiang made no secret of his new alliance. In September deputy propaganda chief Zhou Fohai, then living in the increasingly vulnerable capital city of Nanjing, declared in his diary that Chiang was “wise” to publicize the agreements with the CCP and the USSR. Zhou had been concerned that the alliance with the CCP might raise eyebrows among foreign observers, but there was little reaction and he congratulated Chiang on his judgment. Yet as the fighting worsened, Wang Jingwei told Zhou that the government should not move so quickly to end diplomatic relations with Japan. Zhou agreed, and criticized T. V. Soong for a speech whose defiant nature he felt was “naïve” and harmful to China’s greater interests.
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In Shanghai the destruction in September stretched on into October. The foreign community looked on in disbelief, finally realizing that the war was not a temporary interruption. Early in the month there were reports of “severe hand-to-hand fighting in the maze of streets between North Szechuen and Paoshan Roads.” Familiar buildings were suddenly taking on frightening new roles. One reporter declared that he had “exchanged salutes with a tattered Chinese soldier who stood back from one of the windows of the [Pantheon] theatre, waved a potato-masher bomb in a friendly manner, then peeped cautiously out of the window . . . and threw the potato-masher at some unwelcome visitor who was evidently lurking in the alley.”
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Nor did the bombing campaign let up. On October 13 it was reported that “Chinese areas and military positions around Shanghai” had been subjected to “the most severe aerial bombardment since the beginning of local hostilities. Japan’s aeroplanes yesterday took to the air over a wide area.”
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Two days later the Japanese committed an act reminiscent of the Nationalists’ Black Saturday disaster: they bombed a tramcar within the neutral International Settlement and killed many Chinese travelers, including an eighteen-month-old girl. On October 20, Shanghai’s North Station was attacked, leaving the railway terminus in ruins and palls of black smoke billowing up, visible across the city. The next day the government escorted groups of foreign and domestic reporters to the station so that they could see the destruction in detail. Photographs of the destruction were printed in newspapers around the world.

The final phase of the battle for Shanghai began on October 24, when the Chinese forces retreated to the Suzhou Creek, only to face two weeks of attack from the Japanese, who had sent in 120,000 troops to finish the job. The Japanese piled on further pressure on November 5, when they landed an amphibious force at Hangzhou Bay, some 150 kilometers southwest of Shanghai. Chiang had withdrawn troops from the area to defend the city itself, but in doing so, he had left the approach to Shanghai vulnerable.
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By early November, Chiang faced the inevitable. His forces could not hold Shanghai. Rather than sacrifice more of his best troops, he decided to pull out, substituting a more achievable aim: to “defeat the enemy’s plan of a rapid decision in a quick war by carrying out a war of attrition and wearing out the enemy.”
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Secretly, on November 8, orders were sent to Chiang’s military commanders to prepare to move out of the city. The order was not, for obvious reasons, made public. Instead, the next day, the newspaper
Zhongyang ribao
reported that Chiang was offering “direct negotiations between China and Japan to prevent any deepening of China’s crisis.”
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The following day, November 10, the Nationalist government misleadingly declared that “Shanghai’s south city will be defended to the death in this war of resistance.” The
North-China Daily News
told a rather different story:

Having watched hostilities on its eastern, northern, and western boundaries for nearly three months, Shanghai faced southward yesterday as China’s armies swiftly withdrew from the Soochow Creek regions during the night and Japanese armed might threw an encircling force after them and captured Lunghwa in the afternoon.
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The next day more wrenching details were revealed in the headlines: “Shanghai’s South City Grievously Attacked in General Assault by Enemy Army.” The article praised the patriotic effort of the Chinese Army, but admitted that it had been “destroyed” by the invading force. On November 12 the inevitable was finally made public: “The lone army in the south city has been given orders to retreat.” The “defense to the death” to save Shanghai would not take place. Nine days later, on November 21, the people of Shanghai learned that the “National Government” would be moving “to Chongqing for long-term resistance.”
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Now that Shanghai was lost, Nanjing could not be defended either. The military command would move upriver to Wuhan, and base its defense of central China there. The government bureaucracy would move further upriver, to the hilltop city of Chongqing in southwest China, a last redoubt against an invasion by land.

Insiders had found out the news earlier than newspaper readers did, among them Zhou Fohai, a few hundred kilometers away in the government offices at Nanjing. On November 13 Zhou met Chen Bulei, Chiang Kai-shek’s political secretary and ghostwriter, who told him that the government would have to relocate immediately. Zhou’s first fear was that the government would collapse as a result of the military disaster. “This day,” he wrote on November 16, “was the beginning of my new life.” He continued: “I am extremely pessimistic . . . China will have no more history. Why should I keep my diary any more?”
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Zhou sought out one of the few comforts left to him: alcohol. Along with love affairs and trips to the movies (he would sometimes go twice a week), drinking had long been one of Zhou’s addictions, and he indulged as he waited for the capital to fall. One night he heard the sinister sound of the wind whistling. In his alcohol-befuddled mind, it seemed to recall the winds that had whipped around the collapsing Ming dynasty when it had fallen to invaders from the north in the mid-seventeenth century. As he and his wife packed their bags to flee for Wuhan, about 450 kilometers to the southwest, he felt like an official of the old Qing court escaping from Beijing as the Eight-Power Army advanced on the capital in 1900 to attack the Boxer rebels who held the foreign legations under siege. These historical allusions were natural ones for Zhou, who was a well-educated son of the affluent upper classes. But the devastation that this invasion would wreak was on a scale unimaginable to his predecessors.

Still, as late as November 28, the press reported continued fighting for the city: “Fierce battle starts in Changxingshan area.” This was the last edition of the newspaper.
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Just why the supply of war news stopped so abruptly mattered little to the residents of the area. What was abundantly clear was that the government had left them at the mercy of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Yet the sacrifice made by the Nationalist armies was real. Chiang had taken a great gamble at Shanghai. By early November he had more than half a million troops on the ground there, but some 187,000 of them were killed or wounded in the first three months of the war, including some 30,000 of the officers who had been so painstakingly trained by Chiang’s German advisers.
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The Communist armies had not been involved in the battle.

The Western powers, despite wringing their hands about the fate of China (and the markets they wished to exploit), did almost nothing to help at this stage. The outbreak of war put British power and goodwill under the spotlight. One British diplomat wrote to the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, from Wuhan that the Chinese government showed:

resigned acceptance of unpalatable fact that there is no immediate hope of foreign intervention. In no case have I heard a sharp criticism of England’s attitude . . . Regret is nevertheless expressed that we should not be in a position to defend our vital political and economic interests in the Far East which Chinese are convinced will be entirely obliterated once Japanese gain control over China.
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