Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (18 page)

An undertone of desperation was beginning to spread among the Chinese commanders. The Japanese landings had achieved the immediate objective of relieving the pressure on the small marine forces holed up in Shanghai. The Chinese had been forced to halt their attacks on Hongkou and Yangshupu. Instead they now had to carefully consider where to allo
cate their resources among various fronts. If the Japanese landing party grew large enough, as was likely, they faced the very real possibility that they could become the object of a Japanese pincer movement. Essentially, within a few days, the Chinese forces had moved from the offensive to the defensive.

It was against this backdrop that Chen Cheng, newly appointed head of the 15th Army Group, arrived in Suzhou on August 24. His presence was intended to help stiffen the resistance, but he was also to acquaint himself with local conditions as he was expected to play a greater role at the front shortly.
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Chen Cheng’s self-assured behavior, and his readiness to overrule the local commander, signaled that real authority already rested with him. He agreed with Zhang Zhizhong’s plans from the day before to counter the landings, but considered them insufficient given the threat posed by the fresh Japanese troops. He ordered that more soldiers be moved from Shanghai proper to the landing zones.
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Zhang Zhizhong meekly agreed. In fact, he left the other officers assembled in Suzhou, including the Germans, with the impression that he was willing to give up the entire Shanghai front.
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Just a few days before, he had impressed foreign reporters with his cold-blooded behavior in the middle of a Japanese air attack,
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but now he came across as downright timid. After ten days of almost no sleep, he seemed to be about to crack. With this kind of leadership in the face of setbacks at the front, it was no surprise that a dangerous defeatist mood was spreading among the generals in Suzhou. To counter this, Falkenhausen proposed a plan that could rekindle the enthusiasm for the offensive among the Chinese. During a long meeting on the night between August 24 and 25, the German general suggested rallying all forces sent to the Luodian area for an attack from all sides against the Japanese landing force. Demonstrating the German predilection for a decisive blow, he wanted to throw the invaders right back into the Yangtze. The assembled officers agreed.
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Even so, as day dawned, the optimism that had animated the nightly staff meeting gradually evaporated. It was now 48 hours since the landings, and the Japanese Army had strengthened its foothold at Chuanshakou, rapidly approaching a critical mass that would make it impossible to dislodge it again. Tanks and artillery were lined up on the riverbank, and engineers were building a pier to facilitate unloading men and materiel at an
even faster rate. Already they were in possession of a bridgehead that measured 10 miles in length, with a depth of five miles, and they had started constructing a road reaching inland, as an obvious preparation for a major offensive.
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In a secret report to Chiang Kai-shek, Falkenhausen described the difficult situation as the Japanese consolidated their material advantage. “It should be noticed that the enemy’s army and navy act in close coordination. Even though his land-based artillery is still weak, this is compensated for by strong naval artillery and ship-based aircraft,” the German general wrote. He added that airfields on Chongming Island helped underpin Japan’s now “complete air superiority” in the area, concluding: “As a result, the main operations on our side should be carried out after dark.”
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The German officer’s words marked both a piece of advice and a statement of established fact. From late August, most Chinese movement took place after sunset. Only then could Chinese and Japanese infantry meet on somewhat even terms, without the crushing advantage that air support gave the latter. Night turned out to be the great equalizer in the uneven battle over Shanghai.

In the daytime, the tirelessly active Japanese seemed to be everywhere. They sent rubber boats up small rivers to scout and harass. Their observation balloons were hanging over the horizon, to keep a watchful eye on the Chinese and immediately scramble aircraft when they detected any movement.
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They combined their technological mastery with bravery approaching the suicidal. When in danger of being taken prisoner, the Japanese often preferred death. After one pitched battle in the area near Luodian, one of the dead retrieved by the Chinese was a sergeant major who had committed hara-kiri, while a seriously injured private was found to have tried to slit his own throat with his razor-sharp bayonet.
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Luodian remained the immediate target of nearly all the Japanese forces in the area, and they faced the same Chinese units that had pushed them out on August 23. The Chinese were firmly entrenched in and around the town, but they were too few to consider offensive operations against the Japanese at Chuanshakou. Instead, they had to do their best to improve their defenses. However, while they were waiting for the Japanese to resume the assault, they were subject to massive and sustained bombardment.
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Among the Chinese officers, there was a sense of crisis and a very real feeling that the line could buckle any time. From their perspective, the Japan
ese were on a roll. From the Japanese invaders’ own perspective, it looked very different.
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Gu Qingzhen, a 12-year-old Chinese boy, had nowhere to run when the Japanese arrived. Many inhabitants in the hamlet of Hanjiazhai, near Luodian, had fled ahead of the invasion force, but his parents had been among the ones who had stayed behind to look after their homes. As a patrol of eight infantrymen speaking their strange, toneless language entered the village, they realized they had made a mistake. The small Gu family was among a group of 13 hiding in a building, but they were detected. The Japanese entered with fixed bayonets, and the slaughter began.

Gu was squeezing with his parents into a narrow space behind a stove. It was no use. A soldier found them and stabbed his mother through her heart. Another thrust, and his father was dead. Gu himself escaped detection, but the bayonet that had killed his parents scraped his head and went through his right shoulder. He lost consciousness. When he came to, he could hear the Japanese soldiers talk loudly outside. His head, neck and shoulders were sticky with blood, his own and that of his parents. Gu remained hidden under the bodies of his parents until the following dawn, when was sure the Japanese had disappeared. He walked through countryside littered with murdered civilians until he met the only person left alive from his village, an old women who took him to be reunited with a relative of his.
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What Gu had been forced to experience was a Japanese brand of requisitioning-cum-murder. The soldiers of the 11th Japanese Division were running out of supplies and had started to do what armies have done since ancient times—live off the land. While the initial landing had gone exactly according to plan, on the second day it was becoming evident that getting provisions on shore was proceeding at a much slower pace than expected. Soldiers and their equipment were also not being unloaded as fast as scheduled. By noon on August 24, only about 80 percent of the second wave had managed to disembark from their boats. This was a far cry from the impressive invasion force that the Chinese officers believed to be forming on the bank of the Yangtze.

The sluggish movement off the ships was partly because of the natural
features of the landing site. The Yangtze was very shallow near its southern bank, and much of the unloading could only take place during a short window of opportunity just before dawn, when the water level was at its highest. The navy had lent a few sailors to help with the onerous task of disembarking the troops. It was not enough. The lack of provisions caused the offensive towards Luodian to slow down. “It’s a terrible pity,” Matsui wrote in his diary. “The main reason is that insufficient men and materiel have been prepared for landing and provisioning.”
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Japanese casualties were gradually increasing as the Chinese reinforcements that had been sent to the Luodian area started making a difference. Two days after the landings, the number of killed and injured from the 11th Division had reached more than 400, and from then on kept rising. Among those who had lost their lives was one of the division’s senior staff officers. He was killed when he stepped off his landing craft at Chuanshakou, by a Chinese airplane that had slipped through the Japanese fighter cover. The number of bodies grew so fast that not all could be cremated, the way the Japanese preferred to dispose of their dead, and all privates and junior officers had to be hastily buried instead.
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For an army claiming to honor its dead soldiers more than those who remained alive, it was a blow to morale.

The 3rd Division faced different challenges in its sector. It was attacked relentlessly on the first day of the landing, and on the second day it had to repel two further major enemy assaults. Also, it was harassed by occasional shelling from Chinese artillery on the Pudong side. However, the biggest danger came from the division’s right flank. North of the landing zone was Wusong fortress, which had been guarding the approach to Shanghai since the wars against the British and French imperialists in the mid-19th century. From their safety behind concrete walls, Chinese infantry and artillery continuously aimed at the Japanese as they disembarked from their boats and moved inland. They also targeted small vessels sailing up the Huangpu River with supplies for the division.
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As the 3rd Division expanded its bridgehead in the days that followed the landing, the Wusong fortress remained a menace, slowing down the build-up of Japanese forces on the shore. Adding to the Japanese sense of being hemmed in, the village of Yinhang to the south was also under Chinese control. This, combined with the steady increase of Chinese defenders
in front of the landing zone, made for a difficult tactical situation. The Japanese casualties, which had initially been considerably lighter than the planners had feared, began to rise. As of August 25, the 3rd Division, or the “Lucky” Division as it was often called, recorded an accumulated total of more than 300 casualties. Two days later, the number had risen to 500, the majority of them killed in action.
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The first thing many Japanese soldiers noticed when disembarking at Wusong was the strange stench that filled the air. It was, they would soon find out, the smell from large pyres near the river where the army was burning its dead.
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As in the 11th Division’s sector, it was difficult to process the bodies fast enough. Sergeant Miyoshi Shozo recorded how he arrived at Wusong a few days after the initial landing to discover heaps of unburied Japanese soldiers who had been killed in action. “All the bodies were swollen with putrefaction, due to the decay of the internal organs,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and the soft part of the bodies had burst through from the pressure. Even the eyeballs bulged six or seven centimeters out from their faces.”
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Four days after the landings, both divisions seemed close to being bogged down. What eventually tilted the balance in their favor was the Japanese Navy. In the days immediately before and after the landings, it steadily built up its fleet in the Yangtze and Huangpu Rivers. This added extra artillery and, crucially, it boosted the air power available to the Japanese. On August 26, Japanese planes flew 16 individual sorties over the Chinese positions, on August 27, that number grew to 29 sorties, and on August 28, a total of 68 sorties were flown.
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This reinstated momentum into the Japanese attack. On August 28, the 3rd Division was finally able to take the village of Yinhang and extricate itself somewhat from the tactical straightjacket it had experienced so far. On the same day, following intense naval bombardment, the 11th Division stormed Luodian. In the vanguard of the attack was Wachi Takaji, a 44-year-old regimental commander who led his men with his sword drawn, personally killing several of the enemy on the way. The Chinese defenders were pushed out of the town and fled down roads leading inland. By noon, Luodian was in Japanese hands. It was not, however, to be the end of the battle for the village. The Chinese would be back. It was after all a prize that Falkenhausen had said must be kept at all cost.
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Guo Rugui was chief of staff of the Chinese Army’s 14th Infantry Division, part of the newly formed 15th Army Group, and nominally he was one of the highest-ranking officers in the unit. Yet, he had one problem: He was a recent arrival and knew no one. That was a severe handicap in the Chinese Army, where personal networks always counted for much, and having no close allies could be fatal.
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Thus, when he tried to propose his plan for retaking Luodian, he faced an uphill struggle. Even though his superiors eventually decided to adopt his plan, those lower down the hierarchy procrastinated. That might be what doomed the attack in the end.
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Up until the Japanese landings, the 14th Infantry Division had been involved in guarding the banks of the Yangtze further upriver. That remained the division’s primary responsibility, so when the order to march for Luodian arrived, it could only spare two of its regiments, the 79th and 83rd, while the other two stayed on guard duty. Guo Rugui arrived with the troops in Jiading, west of Luodian, on August 29. Learning that Luo-dian had just fallen, Guo suggested to his divisional commander that no time should be wasted and that they should strike that very night while the Japanese were still not fully settled in their new positions, catching them off balance. The 83rd Regiment was to launch a frontal attack, while the 79th was to march in a long arc around Luodian and attack the enemy from behind.