Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (5 page)

However, a shadow was hanging over Gong’s youthful thirst for adventure. One of his best friends during 18 months of training at aviation school had been killed the same month in a flying accident. It had been the saddest day of Gong’s life.
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Leafing through Rickenbacker’s war memoirs, he found advice that helped him out of the stupor caused by his friend’s death. “One of the greatest horrors of the war,” the American ace wrote, was the pilots’ “callous indifference upon the sudden death of their dearest chum.” And yet, Rickenbacker added, a certain emotional numbness was a simple necessity. Fighter pilots had to keep fit and clear-minded, and they could not allow themselves to be dulled by thoughts over lost friends. “I must learn from Rickenbacker,” Gong declared in his diary.
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Despite considerable holes in China’s military preparedness, at some point in July Chiang Kai-shek decided that it was the time to openly resist Japan. Furthermore, he believed that Shanghai was the place where the first battle had to take place. It was a decision heavily influenced by Falkenhausen, and it made strategic sense. By initiating new hostilities in the Shanghai area, Japan would be forced to divert its attention from the north China front, thus forestalling a Japanese thrust towards the important city of Wuhan. It would also prevent any interruption of potential supply routes from the Soviet Union, the most likely source of material assistance given Moscow’s own enmity with Japan.
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It was a clever plan, and the Japanese did not anticipate it. Rather, intelligence officers in Tokyo were convinced that Chiang would send his troops to the north of China.
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One afternoon in late July, a group of high-ranking officers gathered at Chiang’s official residence in the capital Nanjing. Zhang Fakui, the officer who had taken part in the summer course, was among the attendees. Also in attendance was Zhang Zhizhong, the 46-year-old commander of military forces in the pivotal area stretching from Nanjing to Shanghai. Meetings such as this one happened on and off, and clearly they were much more than just social events for Chiang, an extreme ascetic who neither drank nor smoked and, despite being married, was said to never engage in
sex. In order to achieve results, the gatherings always followed the same set procedure. First Chiang would raise an issue, then every person present would explain his view in turn, and in the end Chiang would draw the final conclusions. Afterwards, there would be dinner. The topic on this hot summer day was no surprise: Japan. After everyone had spoken, Chiang summarized the opinions that had been aired. Since China had decided to resist, he said, it should take the initiative in Shanghai. There was no turning back.

Zhang Fakui already knew that Shanghai was where his services would be required. The same afternoon, Chiang gave him more detailed instructions, putting him in charge of the right wing of the army, which was being prepared for action in the metropolitan area. He was given responsibility for the forces east of the Huangpu River in the part of Shanghai referred to as Pudong, an area of warehouses, factories and rice fields. Zhang Zhizhong, a quiet-spoken and somewhat sickly-looking man who had previously headed the Central Military Academy,
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was to command the left wing west of the Huangpu. The officers all welcomed the plan, immediately seeing the intuitive logic of taking on the Japanese in Shanghai, rather than around Beijing. There were not only strategic but also tactical benefits. The wide open north Chinese plains were ideal tank country and would give the Japanese armored columns a crushing advantage. The Shanghai area, by contrast, abounded in rivers and creeks, all favoring defensive operations. Logistically, too, the Chinese would benefit from a well-developed network of highways and railways radiating out from Shanghai. “We wanted to open a second front, to launch an offensive to split the enemy’s forces in China,” Zhang Fakui said many years later. “I approved of it. Everyone approved of it.”
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Zhang Zhizhong seemed to be an ideal pick to lead the troops in downtown Shanghai, where most of the fighting was likely to take place. The job as commandant of the military academy was a coveted position that enabled its holder to form links with junior officers earmarked for fast-track promotion. This meant that he personally knew the generals of both the 87th and 88th Divisions, which were to make up the core of Zhang’s newly formed 9th Army Group and become his primary assets in the early phases of the Shanghai campaign.
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Besides, he had the right aggressive instincts. Zhang Zhizhong felt that China’s confrontation with
Japan had come in three stages. In the first stage, the Japanese invasion of the northeast in 1931, Japan had attacked and China had remained passive. In the second stage, the first battle of Shanghai in 1932, Japan had struck, but China had struck back. Zhang Zhizhong argued that this would be the third stage, where Japan was preparing to strike, but China would strike first.
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It appears that Zhang Zhizhong did not expect to survive this final showdown with the Japanese arch-foe. He took the fight very personally and even ordered his daughter to interrupt her education in England and return home to serve her country in the war.
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Even so, he was not the strong commander that he seemed to be. He had one important weakness. He was seriously ill. He never disclosed his actual condition, but it appeared that he was on the brink of a physical and mental breakdown after years in stressful jobs. He had in fact recently, in the spring of 1937, taken a leave of absence from his position at the military academy. When the war broke out, he was at a hospital in the northern port city of Qingdao and was preparing to go abroad to convalesce. He canceled his plans in order to contribute to the struggle against Japan. When his daughter returned from England and saw him on the eve of battle, it worried her to see how skinny he had become.
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From the outset, a question mark hung over his physical fitness to command.

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Liliane Willens, a nine-year-old girl born in Shanghai to Russian Jewish émigré parents, was vacationing in July 1937 at Mount Mogan—a cool inland retreat that was favored by Shanghai’s well-to-do after a popular seaside resort up north near Beijing had become unsafe due to the escalating conflict in the region. One day, Liliane’s four-year-old younger sister told her she had met Chiang Kai-shek, who sometimes spent time in the area. The Chinese leader had been strolling along a mountain path, and although surrounded by numerous guards, he had smiled at the small girl and said “Hello” in English. Her curiosity awakened, Liliane arranged an expedition to Chiang’s villa, but the children were stopped by a group of armed soldiers barking at them to leave immediately.
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After this brief brush with power, Liliane returned to Shanghai with her parents. It was a city subtly transformed by rumors of war. On the sur
face, an appearance of peaceful normalcy prevailed with even the Japanese behaving as if nothing had changed, and engaging in friendly competition with representatives of the other foreign powers in the city. The visiting baseball team of Tokyo’s Meiji University inflicted a resounding defeat on a team of Shanghai-based American marines.
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On France’s Bastille Day, July 14, the armored Japanese cruiser
Izumo,
moored in the Huangpu River, joined the flagship of the French fleet in offering up a searchlight display.
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Everyone was complaining about the unbearable heat and worrying about the upcoming typhoon seasons. It was almost as if the weather was the main concern.

Still, underneath it all was a constant lingering tension fueled by contradictory military and diplomatic news. Unfounded reports in the local press about great Chinese victories on the northern front often caused patriotic crowds to set off fireworks.
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However, the mood could change overnight. Carroll Alcott, a correspondent for the Associated Press, developed an ability to gauge public sentiment by looking out of his window every morning. If thousands of civilians were heading towards the supposed safety of the International Settlements, “then the men on the floors of the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the gold bar market were talking war.”
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People in Shanghai had learned a lesson from the hostilities five years earlier. They realized that it was vital to escape the combat zone before fighting broke out. Once the first shot had been fired, it would be too late. They also knew that Zhabei was the area to avoid.

There were a few scares. On the evening of July 24, a Japanese sailor was reported missing, setting off a frantic search throughout the city. Grim-faced Japanese soldiers with steel helmets and fixed bayonets deployed in the streets, checking rickshaws and vehicles. Obvious parallels were drawn between this event and the Marco Polo Bridge incident, where the temporary loss of one Japanese soldier had set the entire north of China ablaze. It did not take long for large numbers of residents to leave Zhabei, pushing their most precious belongings in wheelbarrows or carrying them in bundles over their shoulders. The panic subsided almost as quickly as it had erupted, and four days later, after most Chinese families had returned to their homes, it emerged that, very much like at Marco Polo Bridge, the sailor had gone AWOL after a visit to a local brothel.
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Despite the unsettling political news, Shanghai remained first and fore
most a place where business was done and fortunes were made. As war approached, residents with investments to protect thought up ingenious ways to see their assets through the coming storms. One ship owner carried out a paper transfer of his company to a German firm, equipping each of his vessels with a swastika flag and a token German captain who did nothing but show up occasionally on the bridge in full uniform. The Chinese entrepreneur figured that the Japanese Army would not seize any ship sailing under the flag of Nazi Germany, a powerful nation that had recently shown signs of wanting to improve relations with Japan. His deception worked. As his steamers plied their Yangtze routes, suspicious Japanese Navy officers monitored them through their binoculars, obviously believing something was not right, but they were not stopped.
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Everyone felt the war coming, regardless of nationality and occupation. In the French Concession, Father Robert Jacquinot de Besange, a Jesuit priest, was watching events with a sense of foreboding. Very much a practical man—he had lost his right arm in a failed chemical experiment at the concession’s Aurora University—he was widely recognized as a champion of the disadvantaged. He had been in Shanghai in 1932 and knew from personal experience about the suffering that modern war in urban areas brought to the civilian population. He feared that the suffering was about to start all over again and his dark premonitions found expression in a poem:

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At 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, August 10, a motley group of officers left the Japanese Consulate on the banks of the Huangpu River. Some were easily recognizable as Chinese officers with their peaked caps, others were Japanese with colonial-style pith helmets; a large number were in western suits, making it harder to determine their nationality. All were members of a hastily composed Sino-Japanese joint investigation team charged with quickly wrapping up the case of the shooting at the Hongqiao Aerodrome the night before. They knew that they would have to reach agreement fast,
or risk losing control of events. On both sides there were people, whether in uniform or not, who were spoiling for a fight, and this incident could be all the pretext they needed.

As they drove to the airport, they passed armed guards of the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps standing at sandbag barricades that had not been there just a few hours earlier. Once at Hongqiao, they paced up and down the scene of the incident under a blazing sun, seeking to agree on what had happened. It was all but impossible. The evidence did not add up to a coherent narrative both sides could accept. The Japanese were not convinced there had been a shoot-out at all. Oyama, the officer who had been in the car, had left his pistol at the marine headquarters in Hongkou and had been unarmed the night before. Whoever shot and killed the man in the Chinese uniform, it could not have been him, they maintained.
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At 6:00 p.m. the investigators returned to the city. Foreign correspondents eager for information knew exactly who to look for. Shanghai Mayor Yu Hongjun, less than two weeks in the job, had already become a darling with the western journalists. Little, sharp-witted and English-speaking, he was the city’s cosmopolitan face to the outside world.
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That evening, uncharacteristically, he had nothing for the reporters, apart from a plea addressed not only to the Japanese, but also the Chinese. “Both sides should maintain a calm [demeanor] so that the situation may not be aggravated,” he said.
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Thirty-nine-year-old Yu was in a difficult situation. He was responsible for millions of civilians, and he was prepared to go to great lengths to prevent open war—greater lengths than any of his foreign sympathizers were aware of at the time.