Read Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze Online
Authors: Peter Harmsen
Tags: #HISTORY / Military / World War II
Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze
Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2013 by
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Harmsen
ISBN 978-1-61200-167-8
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-168-5
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N
O ENDEAVOR IS A ONE-MAN UNDERTAKING
. T
HIS 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.
T
AIPEI
, F
EBRUARY 2013
I
N 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.
