Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (25 page)

On September 19, engineers began digging a tunnel from the trenches towards “the white house.” Four days later, they had dug exactly 35 yards, halving the distance the infantry would have to run across open land before reaching the wall. A new attack was launched on September 23, the second day of the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. On this day in the lunar calendar, the emperor, a living god to most Japanese, would worship at the shrine of his ancestors, confirming the link between the Japan of the present age and the proud Japan of history. It was a reminder to all Japanese of what made them special and set them apart from the rest of mankind. On such a day, the attack could not be allowed to go wrong.

In the early afternoon, the Japanese kicked off the assault in their usual way. First came the artillery bombardment, then air raids. Finally, the tanks rolled up and moved towards the walls, as small clusters of soldiers followed in their tracks. In addition, the attack had one surprise in store for the Chi
nese. Just as the assault got underway, the mouth of the tunnel suddenly opened up, and soldiers leaped out in single file, so close to the wall that the Chinese machine gunners had no time to swing their barrels towards them. They rushed forward, carrying heavy satchels of explosives. Pressing against the walls, they lit the fuses then hastily sought cover. Loud explosions followed, and as the dust settled, the Japanese poured through the new gaping holes in the walls, fanning out inside the compound. After a fierce, two-and-a-half hour fight, the building was taken over by the Japanese. The regiment’s honor, and Colonel Wachi’s, had been saved.

The capture of “the white house” was part of a major offensive launched by the 11th Division in the Luodian area. It had originally been planned for September 20, but was delayed for several days because preparations took longer than expected, as was usually the case in the difficult countryside around Shanghai. The division attacked south of the town, opting for a narrow front in order to assemble enough troops to achieve a powerful, concentrated punch through Chinese positions. The Japanese used massed armor in the attack, deploying aircraft to take out any antitank weapons that appeared. Their tactics worked. The Chinese were pushed back in several sections of the front.
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In order to muster enough forces for the attack, the division had put the Shigeto Detachment in charge of covering its right flank north and west of Luodian. However, the newly arrived detachment, which was still brimming with morale, did more than that, attacking vigorously and trying to push back the Chinese in its assigned sector. The detachment achieved relatively little of any significance, and lost a large number of soldiers. “The detachment has already had 200 casualties,” Matsui wrote. “They can’t go on attacking blindly like this.”
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Further south the 3rd Japanese Division also launched attacks against Chinese positions, mainly in the area in front of Liuhang. The fighting in the area once again showed Japan’s material superiority to be so pronounced that the Chinese feared to use heavy weaponry, even when it was available. All anti-aircraft guns in the area had been positioned near artillery batteries, but counterproductively, they hardly dared release any fire, lest they gave away the artillery’s position. The result was that the Chinese Army enjoyed effectively no air defense whatsoever.
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Generally, the local Chinese reserves were unable to throw back the
Japanese, and the see-saw battle that had characterized the front since early September gave way to a several-day period when the Japanese held on to the positions even after dark. Under the circumstances, the Chinese commanders decided to carry out yet another major retreat along the entire front north of Shanghai. They used a lull in the Japanese attacks on September 25 to pull back to a line roughly one mile to the rear. As before, they implemented the withdrawal with perfect discipline, and it was two more days before the Japanese completely understood that their enemy had melted away.
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Following hard on the heels of these Japanese succeses, major changes started to happen. The three divisions that the Japanese high command had ordered dispatched to the Shanghai area early in September gradually started arriving. First to land in the area south of Wusong was the 101st Division, which began disembarkation on September 22, and was ordered to deploy on the left flank of the 3rd Division. The 9th Division arrived in the same area on September 27, followed by the 13th Division on October 1.
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Japan now had five divisions in Shanghai, against more than 25 divisions fielded by the Chinese.

Even if no one could doubt China’s numerical superiority, the disparity was not as drastic as would seem. A typical Japanese division had 15,000 men, and combined with the marines and infantrymen defending Hongkou, the Japanese had roughly 90,000 soldiers at its disposal in and around the city. Chinese divisions, by comparison, frequently had as few as 5,000 men, and therefore it is unlikely that China deployed more than 200,000 soldiers in Shanghai at the time. Besides, the Japanese more than compensated for their numerical inferiority with their large superiority in materiel and airplanes, as well as with their naval artillery, which was still able to reach important parts of the Chinese front.
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All in all, the three new divisions marked a massive boost to the Japanese forces, and Matsui and his staff immediately started preparations for what they hoped would be the final blow to the Chinese defenders. Their plan was simple. They would launch a single powerful thrust across Wusong Creek and move from there to Suzhou Creek. Their aim was to surround and annihilate the main Chinese force in a maneuver that they had intended to carry out ever since they landed in China. After all, encirclement was the fundamental operation favored above any other in Japan
ese military doctrine. The only reason they hadn’t already staged such an attack long before was a lack of resources. Encirclement with just two divisions, the 3rd and the 11th, would have caused the flanks to be too thinly manned and exposed to Chinese counterattack.
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Now Matsui finally had the strength needed to launch the operation that would trap the Chinese in the city they were supposed to defend.

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Nothing could go seriously wrong if you were in a mortar unit. Most of the time you would be located 500 yards behind the frontline, offering support for the infantry at the sharp end. At least, that was what the soldiers in Maebara Hisashi’s unit told themselves when they shipped off to China. Maebara himself was a 30-year-old reservist, and had unexpectedly been torn out of his civilian routine in late August when he received the order to mobilize. It was inconvenient, but he, too, had left Japan with quiet confidence in victory.
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After it had arrived in the Shanghai area, Maebara’s unit was deployed for several weeks without casualties. However, in the end, they ran out of luck.

During a skirmish, the company’s mortars received three direct hits from Chinese artillery. The shrapnel chewed through the crews, and the shockwave sent bodies and body parts flying through the air, shattering them against the walls of buildings nearby. A lump of red-hot metal had hit one of the soldiers in the chest. His blood poured out in a thick, dense stream, and he died almost instantaneously. Next to him, a piece of shrapnel had sliced open a soldier’s stomach. His intestines had spilled out all at once like a bag of slippery eels. Medics arrived, stuffed the innards back in and hastily unraveled the injured soldier’s puttees in order to use the strips of mud-covered cloth to dress the gaping wound. “This is screwed up,” the injured soldier said in a voice marked by both pain and anger. “Do I really have to die in this hole?” Gradually, his loud swearing transformed into quiet whimpers, then complete silence. He was one of 18 Japanese killed in the attack.

After the shooting along the front died down, Maebara’s unit received orders to cremate those killed and prepare the ashes for the return to Japan. The problem was, they were in the middle of a barren battlefield, and they did not have enough wood for suddenly disposing of 18 corpses. Someone
had an idea: let’s get the Chinese to provide the fuel, he suggested. Full of resentment, the soldiers walked to a farm building nearby, tore it down and carried away the beams. As Maebara watched the flames of the pyres rise towards the night sky, two separate thoughts kept recurring in his mind. “If this goes on, I won’t live for very long. I better start bracing myself for the fact that death can occur any moment,” was his first thought. His second thought: “You Chinese made our brothers die in this terrible way. We’ll make you pay! It’s because of you that we’ve come here to fight and suffer. You wanted this war. It’s your fault!” For the first time, Maebara was consumed by actual hatred of the enemy.

He soon found out that he was not the only one who felt this way. A mood of poorly repressed fury spread through the company. Revenge was in the air. The next day guards grabbed three ordinary Chinese who happened to pass by their bivouac. There was no way they could be mistaken for soldiers. They were men in their early 30s, wearing tattered peasant clothes. Their unruly hair and undisciplined demeanor showed they had never worn a uniform. However, they would do. Yelling at the captives while punching and kicking them mercilessly, the Japanese soldiers tied their hands behind their backs and made them kneel in the mud. The Chinese appeared to know something terrible was going to happen to them. All three shut their eyes tight.

A group of soldiers grabbed one of the Chinese and dragged him to the side. They unbuttoned the top of his shirt and forced him to stretch out his neck for a cleaner cut. It didn’t work. The soldier who had taken on the role of executioner was clearly doing it for the first time. He swung his sword ineptly, and brought it down with too little force, managing to make only a gash at the back of the Chinese man’s neck. He swung the sword a second time, and a third. It took four clumsy attempts to finally sever the head from the body. He did not have much more luck with the other two men. When he was done, he was splattered from top to toe in his victims’ blood. “We did poorly today,” the Japanese soldiers complained to each other later that day. “Not a single head came off with just one strike. We’ll have to do a better job next time.”

Shanghai’s famous waterfront The Bund seen from the south. The Huangpu River is to the right. The WWI memorial is in the foreground.
From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries

Two soldiers in a position on the outskirts of Shanghai. They both wear the German M35 helmet, with the Nationalist Chinese symbol, a white star on a dark blue background.
From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries

A Chinese soldier wearing a typical uniform from the elite 87th and 88th Infantry Divisions deployed in the Shanghai area from the first days of the battle. He is carrying his two stick grenades in pouches hanging from his shoulders.
From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries