Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (29 page)

The Chinese commanders were desperate to keep the front intact for as long as possible, and any fresh forces that turned up in the Shanghai area were likely to be sent to the frontline immediately. Some were of good quality. Among them were units from the Tax Police Division. Despite its name,
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the division had developed into a fully equipped military formation with a highly motivated and trained corps. Consisting of six regiments, it was a force of more than 25,000 well-armed soldiers, with a backbone of tough and experienced officers who had previously served under the northern warlord Zhang Xueliang.
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In all haste, Tax Police units were ordered to Tangqiaozhan, where the road from Luodian to Dachang bridged Wusong Creek. It was the key po-sition in the entire operation, and the longer the Chinese could keep the bridge, the greater their hope of stalling the Japanese advance. The Tax Police, who set up strong positions at the northern end of the bridge, found themselves surrounded on three sides. The opposing forces engaged in fierce fighting, at times meeting in hand-to-hand combat. On the second day after they arrived, casualties has grown so large that the Tax Police units were pushed south across the bridge, which was lost to the advancing Japanese.
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A crisis atmosphere reigned when the staff of Third War Zone held its meeting, chaired by Chiang Kai-shek, in Suzhou on October 11. There was general agreement that the attempts made so far to stop the Japanese advance south across Wusong Creek had not worked. Each time troops had been hurled into battle, they had merely bounced off the Japanese front, without regaining any major ground. A more ambitious undertaking was needed. Chen Cheng, the commander of the left wing, suggested an attack in his sector targeting the area around Luodian. However, the majority view in the meeting was that an operation of this kind would not have any immediate impact on the Japanese advance near Wusong Creek, and it was dismissed.
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Instead, the meeting heard a rival suggestion by Bai Chongxi, a south Chinese general with the serene demeanour of a Buddhist cleric.
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Bai, who was attached to the Third War Zone in an informal advisory role, called for a simultaneous attack along both banks of Wusong Creek into the right flank of the advancing Japanese. It would be a major operation and would require a large number of troops if it were to have any chance of succeeding. Bai knew exactly where he was going to get the necessary manpower—four divisions from south China’s Guangxi province, who were already in transit, were due to arrive in Shanghai within few days. Chiang Kai-shek liked the idea of a single, devastating blow aganst the Japanese. The meeting approved Bai’s proposal.
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The enthusiasm was not shared by the German advisors. As the battle evolved, they watched with growing apprehension as the Chinese decision making got bogged down in endless talk. One example was a lengthy debate about whether the Jiangwan salient should be abandoned in order to shorten the front and avoid spreading the troops too thinly. Only after long hours of discussion did the Chinese commanders decide to give up the idea as it would cause a dangerous shrinkage of the link between Shanghai and the Chinese interior.
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The Germans believed that much talk that in the end produced few decisions was a consequence of the way the Chinese command was structured. Gu Zhutong, Chiang’s deputy in Suzhou, was served by not just a chief of staff but also two advisors. There were also individual generals attached informally to Gu’s headquarters. In German eyes, Bai Chongxi was a prime example. With no formal command, he was supposed to provide
his views on operational issues. To the Germans, used to clear military hierarchies, this was an arrangement bound to create inefficient solutions. “The responsibilities of the actual chief of staff had been watered down and the scene was set for endless and fruitless councils,” wrote Albert Newiger, one of the advisors, after his return to Germany.
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One area where the arrogant Germans had to concede that their Chinese apprentices had improved was artillery. For the first time in the entire Shanghai campaign, during the battles around Wusong Creek the Chinese command decided to concentrate nearly all the artillery at its disposal. A total of six artillery battalions were moved to positions in the vicinity of Nanxiang and placed under the unified command of the head of the Tang-shan Artillery School near Nanjing. From there, they carried out coordinated barrages for the duration of the fight for the crucial area south of Wusong Creek.

The Chinese commanders had been reluctant to carry out this measure, due to their well-founded fear that any gathering of artillery would immediately attract enemy air attack. To defend the positions, they deployed several batteries of 2cm anti-aircraft guns and one battery of 3.7cm anti-aircraft guns, which were positioned on both sides on Nanxiang. It turned out that these guns, which were not particularly numerous and of small caliber, were sufficient to intimidate the Japanese aircraft, so that they either avoided attacking the artillery altogether or did so from such an altitude that the effect was negligible.

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“We caught a spy!” someone shouted. Sone Kazuo rushed towards the voice. Since the 22-year-old Japanese squad leader had landed at Wusong with the 3rd Division, he had not seen a single Chinese up close, and he was curious about what they looked like. The “spy” was a woman of about 60. With lowered voice she kept mumbling away in her own language. More soldiers started crowding around, and they began discussing what to do with her. Suddenly, a voice cut through the chatter: “I’ll kill her.” The voice belonged to a young soldier with a cultured appearance that betrayed a wealthy family background. He had a combat knife in his hand. Without hesitation, he walked up to the old woman, shouting: “Hey, you!” As she turned around, he stabbed her in the chest. The
woman cried out briefly. She was dead before she hit the ground.
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Sone Kazuo had been brought up by his grandmother, a devotee of the Buddhist faith, who had taught him that the greatest possible offense was to kill a living being. As a boy he had taken this seriously and felt sorry even when he happened to step on ants on the way to school. However, that was all in the distant past and he had decapitated his first prisoner not long after disembarking at Shanghai. His unit had found three enemy soldiers while overrunning a Chinese position. Initially, they wanted to shoot them, but an older soldier, who had been fighting previously in northeast China, had a better idea. “Why don’t we cut off their heads,” he said. He turned towards Sone. “It’s really rare you get to chop someone’s head off. It’s an experience you can take back home. Sir, you should try it.”

Being a squad commander and standing in front of his troops, Sone did not dare show weakness. He agreed, and the old soldier eagerly took the initiative, ordering a group of privates standing nearby to escort the three prisoners to a riverbank, where they were forced to their knees. Sone stepped behind the first prisoner and raised his sword. He suddenly felt slightly panicky, but he could not back down. “Kill!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. He struck with such force that the the sword cut clean through the man’s neck and burrowed its edge into the soil in front of his boots. The severed head rolled down the embankment like a football and fell into the river with a small, innocuous plop. Sone turned around and looked at the decapitated body. A thick stream of blood poured out. Then it became a trickle. It had all taken a few seconds, but for Sone it had been like a slow-moving dream.
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The war between China and Japan was one where no quarter was given. The Japanese claimed in public that all prisoners were being treated well,
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but the reality was very different. Matsui Iwane mentioned in his diary how a unit fighting a successful engagement near Wusong ended up with 500 prisoners. The defiant attitude of the captives caused the Japanese to worry that they might pose a security threat. “So they were all shot,” Matsui wrote.
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The Dutch spy de Fremery mentioned what he described as “an improbably low” number of prisoners of war. The Japanese claimed to have seized several hundred, but de Fremery wondered “if they ever did exist, which may be heavily subject to sincere doubt.”
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There were very few desertions from the Chinese Army. The soldiers
had nowhere to run. Few were from Shanghai and would not be able to get by in the alien environment, where the dialect was entirely different from their own. However, more importantly, they exposed themselves to the risk of running into the Japanese Army, and rumors had been circulating from early on of their brutal handling of prisoners.
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Anyone ending up in Japanese hands was considered as good as dead. Captives, including civilians suspected of spying, were interrogated and once they had no more information to offer, they were disposed of. The likely fate awaiting Chinese prisoners was also well understood within the Japanese ranks. When a Buddhist priest serving as military clergy handed over a Chinese soldier he had personally overpowered, he begged the Japanese soldiers to preserve his life, knowing full well that this was far from a foregone conclusion.
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Typically executions were in the traditional manner of decapitation. Shanghai residents got used to the sight of headless bodies, frozen in the kneeling position they had assumed at the moment of death, floating down Suzhou Creek.
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Those were the lucky ones. There were reports that injured Chinese prisoners were tied together, face down, doused with gasoline and burned. “Their corpses had the sheen of black lacquer and their limbs were all contorted,” read an account of such an instance shortly after the battle of Shanghai. “Crawling on the ground they looked like turtles.”
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It is not unlikely that the prospect of mind-boggling cruelty at Japanese hands contributed to the Chinese determination, exhibited from early on in the battle, to fight to the last man.

The maltreatment of prisoners was mutual. Accounts of Japanese prisoners being kept for long by the Chinese were virtually non-existent. Frequently, this was due to circumstances at the front, whether in the urban areas or the surrounding countryside. Under confusing and dangerous battlefield conditions, there was simply nowhere to place captives. Officers saved themselves endless trouble by simply ordering prisoners killed. However, even when facilities were available, nothing was done to accommodate enemy POWs. Dutchman de Fremery never saw or heard about a single instance of any Japanese troops being among the 20,000 injured soldiers being treated at Chinese hospitals in the Shanghai area.
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Especially at the start of the Sino-Japanese war, the treatment of Japanese prisoners at the hands of the Chinese “beggared belief” and marked a
throw-back to a less-civilized past, according to the German war correspondent Lily Abegg. Often civilians took part in the maltreatment of captured Japanese. Abegg mentioned an example of two Japanese pilots who were shot down during a raid of Nanjing. They were “torn to pieces” by a furious mob, and when military police arrived they could not find a single trace of them remaining on the scene.
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The killing of Japanese prisoners, often in a horrific fashion, was a source of concern for the Chinese command. It wanted to be able to show off well-treated prisoners for propaganda purposes, and doubtless, it also wanted to exploit the captives for their intelligence value. In the end, it offered a money prize for any Chinese, soldier or civilian, who was able to hand over a living Japanese prisoner to the authorities. However, this had little effect. “The soldier’s hatred toward the Japanese,” a Chinese general said a little later in the war, “is enormous. It’s impossible to have a prisoner delivered to headquarters although we pay from 50 to 100 yuan upon delivery, and there are severe punishments for not doing so. The soldiers say that the prisoners die along the way.”
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The scene reminded Sun Liren of the situation when a group of tourists step off a train and are mobbed by staff from competing hotels all scrambling to offer rooms. The only difference was that when he got off the train with his soldiers in the pitch black at Nanxiang Railway Station on October 7, the people grabbing at his sleeves begging him to come with them were ranking officers from depleted divisions along the front, desperate for reinforcements. At age 36, Sun was commanding one of China’s best units, the 4th Regiment of the Tax Police, a coveted asset. The upshot of the confused scene at the train station was that he was assigned to the 88th Division, which had suffered heavily in the battles since late August in the northwestern part of Shanghai.
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By noon the next day, almost all of Sun’s regiment had been cannibalized and sent to reinforce worn-out units all along the 88th Division’s frontline. All that was left was Sun himself and a group of about 20 orderlies and clerks. By 2:00 p.m. he got a call from the division. It needed more reinforcements, as the front was about to collapse near a small bridge north of Zhabei. Sun replied that he had no more soldiers available, but the offi
cer at the other end insisted: “It’s an order. If you disobey, you’ll be court-martialed.”

Sun had no choice but to hastily organize the two dozen soldiers over whom he maintained direct command and march to the bridge in pouring rain. When they arrived, he saw Chinese soldiers withdrawing across the bridge in large numbers. He asked what they were running away from, and the answer was prompt. “The officers have all left,” one of the soldiers said. “We also don’t want to die.” Sun told them he was an officer, in fact the commander of an entire regiment, and that he would stay and fight with them.

The Japanese, who were in close pursuit, were astonished to see the Chinese abruptly turn around and make a stand. Sun watched with satisfaction as the enemy troops immediately lost momentum, and started moving back to their original positions. They must have thought, he said to himself, that the Chinese defenders had received strong reinforcements, rather than just a small group of 20 bespectacled staff aides. The Japanese advance in the sector had been halted. Wet to the bone and freezing, Sun went back to report to the divisional commander. The general was sitting in his headquarters, shielded from the rain and cold and the bullets of the enemy, together with two of his regimental commanders. Sun wondered what they were doing there, so far behind the frontline and his glee turned to dismay.
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Sun would continue to fight bravely on the Shanghai front for the next month, but he had become aware that officers and men were not sharing the hardship in equal measure.