Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (22 page)

Matsui’s requests for reinforcements had not triggered an immediate
response from Tokyo. The main obstacle was posed by his direct superiors. The Japanese Army’s top brass saw Shanghai and central China in general as a sideshow to the north Chinese theater, which they considered more important given its proximity to the Soviet threat. This perception was only reinforced by the signing of the Sino-Soviet agreement in late August. On a more practical, tactical level, the Japanese Army was reluctant to deploy troops in Shanghai because of its difficult terrain, which favored defense, and because the large number of Chinese troops crammed into the area made the task of achieving victory seem hardly within reach. The army’s preferences were reflected in the distribution of its troops. While there were so far only two Japanese divisions in the Shanghai area, in the north the army had deployed no fewer than six.
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The main advocate of the army point of view was Ishiwara Kanji, head of the General Staff Operations Division. Opposed to the war in China from the outset and favoring a policy of non-expansion instead, he advised that troops be spared for what he and many others believed was an inevitable showdown with the Soviet Union. Concentrating on China and ignoring the Soviet menace was, in his eyes, like “chasing the dogs away from the front door while forgetting the wolves approaching the back door.”
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However, Ishiwara’s reluctance to send more troops to Shanghai was overruled. On September 4, a meeting of officers in Tokyo led to the conclusion that the battle in the Shanghai area should be completed by late October or early November and to that end, sufficient troops should be deployed.
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Three days later, Emperor Hirohito approved the reinforcement of the Shanghai front and the dispatch of three extra infantry divisions from the home islands, along with units from the garrison forces in the colony of Taiwan.
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Ishiwara was so upset with the decision that he handed in his resignation. He was later appointed to the army in the northeast of China.
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There was little doubt in Japanese minds that the deployment of the reinforcements marked a serious escalation in the war. The situation was different from anything Japan had ever experienced before. Army Minister Sugiyama Hajime said in a statement to his commanders: “This war has become total war.”
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Adding to the conflict’s special character, for the first time in modern history Japan was facing an enemy literally prepared to
fight to the death. “The enemy resistance is undeniably strong,” a Japanese officer inspecting the Shanghai front wrote in his report upon his return to Tokyo. The determination of the Chinese defenders, he warned, was not to be underestimated. “Whether they are bombed out or surrounded, they do not retreat.”
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When 28-year-old Wu Yafu arrived near Luodian with China’s 58th Infantry Division in early September, neither he nor anyone else in his battalion wasted any time. Their first priority was to dig trenches, fast. They knew that this was the only effective defense against the Japanese artillery. They had only dug down a few feet before they hit water, which was not surprising since they were digging in low-lying land that in some places was even below the Yangtze a few miles to the east. Soon they were standing in ankle-deep mud, but they kept digging. They knew they had no choice if they wanted to stay alive. The local farmers, poor as they were, came out of their small huts to help them. They tore down parts of their own homes for timber to improve the soldiers’ positions. They also helped camouflage the dugouts so they were not so easily detected from the air.
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After they were finished, Wu Yafu and his comrades sat down to wait. More than a week passed, and still the Japanese had not attacked. But they would come sooner or later, everyone knew that. The farmers, too, were aware that the war was about to reach their homes, and they disappeared a few at a time, joining the growing army of refugees roaming the countryside around Shanghai. Meanwhile, a continuous heavy downpour made life in the trench even more uncomfortable than before. Wu Yafu and the other soldiers of his battalion rarely had any real rest. The Japanese guns saw to that. Every now and then Wu and his comrades would hear the shrill scream of an incoming shell, and for a few tense seconds they would be waiting and praying, heaving a sigh of relief when they heard the explosion somewhere else.

Then on September 14, the Japanese assault finally came. As always, the attackers were preceded by a heavy artillery barrage. However, luckily for Wu Yafu’s battalion, the downpour had turned the dirt roads near their positions into sticky quagmires and made it impossible for the enemy to use tanks, so they only had to deal with the infantry. From behind their
defenses, Wu’s unit beat back the Japanese, inflicting heavy losses. Over the next three days, the Japanese changed their tactics and subjected the Chinese positions to repeated air attack. This had some effect. Five men from Wu’s battalion were killed, and ten injured. Even so, they still held their position.
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Luodian had stayed under Japanese control since late August, but the surrounding countryside remained largely Chinese territory. Even though the Japanese stepped up the pressure after the Chinese withdrawal south on September 12, they advanced only slowly and haltingly. Taken aback by the sudden gain of Yuepu and Yanghang, and demonstrating their usual tardy response to unforeseen events, it had taken them several days to even send out patrols for probing attacks against the new Chinese defenses. This gave the Chinese commanders extra time to reinforce their positions near Luodian, especially on both sides of the road from Yuepu, which they assumed, correctly, was to be the main route taken by the Japanese attackers.
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Chinese preparations were merely one of the reasons why Japan’s mid-September assault was only a moderate success. The Japanese, like the Chinese, had yet to develop much skill in coordinating infantry and armor operations. The road connecting Yuepu and Luodian, unlike the area defended by Wu Yafu and his fellow soldiers, was of relatively good quality and allowed the Japanese to deploy a force of about 25 tanks to act as the spearhead of the thrust. The armored vehicles quickly eliminated the Chinese positions closest to the road and rolled at great speed all the way to Luodian. However, the accompanying infantry, men from the Amaya Detachment, was unable to follow suit. The Japanese only commanded a few yards of countryside on either side of the road. Beyond that narrow belt, the area was teeming with Chinese soldiers for whom the Japanese soldiers marching down the elevated road were easy targets. The Japanese infantrymen were bogged down, and it was only after dark, when Chinese defenders north of the road decided to withdraw west, that they had a chance to reach Luodian.
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To be sure, the debacle on the road to Luodian was not only a question of flawed training in the Japanese ranks. The area around Shanghai, a latticework of small farm plots divided by creeks and canals, was not at all suited to tank warfare. This terrain had been a main argument used by the
Japanese Army against large-scale deployments there. Even so, once the decision was made in Tokyo to send enough troops to win the battle for the city, the generals had to think of ways to overcome the difficulties posed by the terrain. One solution was to deploy amphibious tanks. But the tactics adopted called for the use of the tanks in a supportive role, rather than in the vanguard of attacks across waterways. If a creek needed to be crossed, the Japanese commanders would initially order a small infantry unit to wade or swim to the other side and, under the cover of darkness, prepare the opposite bank to make it possible for the tanks to make a landing. While it was still dark, the tanks would cross and be able to support the infantry by daybreak.

It was a cumbersome procedure, almost putting the cart before the horse, and the Japanese did it exactly by the book time and again. This allowed the Chinese opponents to acquaint themselves with Japanese doctrine to the extent that they could usually predict what the Japanese would do next. This could have proven immensely valuable, but once again the German advisors were frustrated by a Chinese reluctance to use expensive equipment, even when faced with the promise of maximum effect. Fear of losing the equipment dictated a policy of keeping it too far in the rear. “Here as in all other cases where the Japanese used tanks at Shanghai,” the German armor specialist Robert Borchardt wrote upon returning home, “the Chinese anti-tank guns could have had good results if they had been used in a purposeful manner and above all close enough to the frontline.”
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While flawed tactics prevented either side from shaking the Luodian front out of its stalemate, they both kept pouring in reinforcements. The Shigeto Detachment arrived from Taiwan and was attached to the 11th Division on September 14, the same day that the Amaya Detachment made its way up the road from Yuepu and returned to the division’s direct command. By the middle of the month, the division had become a sizeable fighting force. The problem was that the enemy it faced around Luodian also grew stronger by the day, and would pose a significant threat to the division’s right flank if it were to rush south towards Dachang and link up with the 3rd Division there. Therefore, on September 18, the Shanghai commanders ordered the division to initially focus on wiping out the Chinese troops amassed around Luodian.
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By that time, heavy rain had already fallen on the region around Shang
hai for three days, gradually causing the fighting to slow down. The Japanese disliked the rain because it turned the roads into muddy rivers making transportation difficult, if not impossible, while also grounding most of their aircraft. By contrast, the Chinese welcomed the lull, as it gave them an opportunity to improve their positions. The challenge of punching through the Chinese positions was only getting harder as time passed.
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The Chinese Army’s performance during the initial stage of the fighting in Shanghai changed the world’s perception of the nation’s military capabilities. China, which had lost every war for the past century, invariably to nations much smaller than itself, had suddenly taken a stand. “There is most emphatically no resemblance whatever discernable between the Chinese army of yesterday and the confident, well-disciplined men whom I saw,” wrote Hubert Hessell Tiltman, after his visit to the Chinese frontline. “They are facing incredible hardships with a courage which deserves the most flattering tribute that a pen can write.”
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At Shanghai, the Chinese Army had seen more bitter fighting than anyone could have anticipated, and it had lost manpower that had taken years to build up. However, it had won prestige and respect, even among its Japanese adversaries. “The era of timid and despicable Chinese is gone,” a Japanese soldier told his compatriots back home. “Some of them are quite courageous.”
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Even the withdrawal on September 12 was greeted with sympathy and admiration in capitals around the world. The feeling was that the Chinese Army had distinguished itself with its “magnificent . . . resistance against the overwhelming weight of Japanese metal,” Reuters reported from London.
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The Chinese Army was a riddle to many of the foreigners who saw it in action. Its soldiers often did not live up at all to western ideas about what hardened veterans ought to be like. “They looked as though a high wind would blow them away,” wrote a foreign correspondent after seeing members of the elite 88th Division from up close. “A few carried oiled-paper umbrellas. One actually carried a canary in a cage. Many walked hand in hand. It seemed preposterous that these thin, tattered boys . . . were heroes of the Chinese Republic!”
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Nevertheless, these boys with their paper umbrellas were able to carry out amazing feats in battle.

Perhaps it was their stoicism and ability to endure hardship that made the difference. American correspondent Edgar Snow recalled touring the battlefield outside Shanghai with U.S. naval attaché Evans Carlson and meeting a young Chinese soldier, probably aged no more than 16, who greeted the two westerners cheerfully. He was still smiling as he explained to Snow that he was the sole survivor of a group of 18 soldiers who had been in a dugout that had taken a direct hit in an artillery barrage the night before. Snow was amazed by his coolness and self-possession.
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“An absence of nerves, and a sense of fatalism when once exposed to death, are assets in Chinese troops which it is doubtful if any Western race possesses,” Snow wrote in his memoirs.
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“My admiration for the Chinese soldier has risen fifty percent,” Snow’s co-traveler to the battlefield, Carlson, wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the pro-Chinese U.S. president who had asked for regular letters about what the American officer saw and heard in China. “With the use of a good spade, a few machine guns and a lot of courage and determination he has made his adversary pay dearly for the few miles he has advanced in the last three months. He sticks to his position through innumerable air bombings and artillery bombardments, and when the Japanese infantry attempt to rush his position he is on the business end of a machine gun to stem the attack. The Chinese soldier has the utmost contempt for the Japanese infantryman. He claims that the latter will not come close in and fight man to man.”
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Every journalist who was in Shanghai in the fall of 1937 had a story to tell about the remarkable Chinese soldier. The American journalist Carroll Alcott spent many hour in dugouts in Zhabei. While Japanese shells pelted down over their heads, the Chinese soldiers sat unfazed in their self-made caves, cooking rice, vegetables and sometimes a small bit of pork over a charcoal brazier. They would dispel the inevitable boredom with games of checkers and mahjong, and write letters home to their families. There was safety and a primitive kind of comfort in the Chinese trenches. Hygiene was lacking, however. Alcott reported having to be deloused every time he returned from Zhabei.
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