Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (24 page)

After about a month in Hongkou, Shen Zui’s network was compromised, and Japanese counterintelligence moved in to arrest everyone. It was time to leave. Shen Zui salvaged his radio, while one of his agents supplied a pram and a one-year-old child. Hiding the radio under the baby, they managed to roll it out under the noses of the Japanese guards. He was greeted in the International Settlement by one of his superiors, who thanked him for a job well done and asked him when he would be ready to go back in again. Not now and not for a long time, Shen Zui answered. He had had enough excitement to last him for quite a while.
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Chiang Kai-shek had decided as early as September 15 that change was needed at the top of the command of the Third War Zone.
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What that meant became clear six days later when Chiang sent two separate cables to the zone’s senior officers. In the first cable he himself took over command of the Third War Zone from Feng Yuxiang, the Christian General, and dispatched him to the Sixth War Zone further north.
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It was a sideways move rather than a direct demotion, but it undeniably removed Feng Yux-iang from the single most important theater at the time. Even so, the decision seemed logical to most senior officers in Suzhou. Feng Yuxiang had never managed to do much while in overall command of the Third War Zone. None of his direct subordinates had ever really considered him to be in charge, and instead they had continued to treat Chiang as their actual commander.
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Feng Yuxiang’s hands-off style certainly did not help him get a firmer grasp of his role as commander, but the main reason for his lack of efficiency was that he had been put in a position at Shanghai where he had to deal mostly with officers closely connected to Nanjing. These were people with whom he had none of the intimate personal ties that were vital in order to achieve anything in the Chinese Army. Equally important, Chiang Kai-shek never completely gained confidence in Feng Yuxiang and consistently undermined his old rival’s authority by interfering directly in the campaign in Shanghai. Feng Yuxiang later described how at one point he had been contacted by Zhang Fakui, the commander of the Pudong troops. Zhang had tried to locate an artillery unit which he believed was under his command, but it was nowhere to be found. Feng looked into the matter and discovered that Chiang Kai-shek had withdrawn the unit single-handedly, ignoring the chain of command and telling no one.
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In the second cable of the day, Chiang Kai-shek went one step further and relieved Zhang Zhizhong of his duties as commander of the 9th Army Group. He replaced him with a general much more to his liking, Zhu Shaoliang, a staunch ally who was, if possible, an even bigger enemy of communism than he himself. For Zhang Zhizhong, the decision came as no major surprise. He had faced Chiang Kai-shek’s constant reproaches right from the early days of the battle. Chiang may initially have picked Zhang because of his close connections to the divisional commanders that he led. However, he grew increasingly disenchanted with Zhang’s style of
command—much talk and little action—and vented his irritation both in front of his staff and in private. The day Wusong fell, Chiang again blamed Zhang. “This is because of his lacking ability,” he wrote in his diary.
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It was an awkward time for a major shake-up. The Chinese forces were under growing pressure along the entire front, and they needed firm command more than ever. It was, therefore, unfortunate that when the generals retired they took their entire staffs with them, leaving a hiatus of one to two weeks before their successors and their staffs were up to speed.
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Still, Chiang Kai-shek was convinced that the change had to be made. There may have been an additional reason for this. Disagreements in the top echelons of the Third War Zone had threatened to bring about paralysis. Zhang Zhizhong had not got along well with Chen Cheng, the commander of the neighboring 15th Army Group. “Chen Cheng isn’t capable enough,” Zhang Zhizhong had told those who would listen. Chen Cheng had retorted: “Zhang Zhizhong loves to show off.” It had been a management nightmare for Chiang Kai-shek, and Feng Yuxiang, whose formal position as Third War Zone commander should have made it his responsibility to mediate, simply did not have the personal clout to make any dif-ference.
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It had been in order to solve this complicated situation that Chiang Kai-shek had sent Gu Zhutong, a person better qualified to mediate among the explosive tempers, to act as second-in-command in the Third War Zone. Nevertheless, it was a cumbersome arrangement, and Chiang Kai-shek probably hoped to bring about a simplified command structure by weeding out senior officers who weren’t performing and placing himself in the central position. That made sense. What made less sense, to some of Chiang’s officers at least, was a decision on the same day to divide the Shanghai front into a left, a central and a right wing. The rationale was to partition the ever growing number of troops in the Shanghai area into groups of manageable size. While that had some logic to it, the move also inserted a new level of command in between the war zone and the army groups and further increased the potential for confusion and dissent, just at the time when the Chinese needed to act in unison against an enemy attack that was quickly picking up momentum.
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Zhang Zhizhong was not surprised to be let go. He had seen it coming for some time. Nevertheless, he was depressed, and perhaps even a broken
man, after his dismissal. He had been working day and night, and eating on the run, while trying to keep Shanghai’s defenses intact. However, it was not enough. In the last weeks before he was officially fired, Zhang Zhizhong felt increasingly sidelined.
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It did nothing to improve his fragile health. More than a month of intense mental pressure had taken an immense toll. Always of slim build, he now came across as downright emaciated. When in late September he returned to his ancestral home in the eastern province of Anhui, his family barely recognized him. He would stay awake long after his family had gone to bed, preferring to sit in his study reading his favorite Chinese classics. He never spoke to his family abut the war. He hardly ever spoke at all, and when he did speak, he had the air of someone who had lost all his strength.
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The foreign residents of Shanghai pretended that there was no war on. Shanghai Football Association held its annual meeting in September to the distant rumble of artillery fire, and reelected the same president it had had since 1925.
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Mailmen brought post past Japanese barbed wire near Sichuan North Road.
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British wharf managers on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River spent their afternoons drinking tea and playing tennis, while Chinese positions were being bombed a mere 500 yards away.
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Shooting and shelling did not change the fact that business was the business of Shanghai. The city was eager to return to its beloved pastime of making money, second in popularity only to the pastime of spending it. The Cathay and Palace Hotels, shut down after the tragedy of “Black Saturday,” opened again in mid-September following extensive repairs. Two movie theaters, the Grand and the Cathay, also showed the latest blockbusters, and nightclubs welcomed customers, although they closed at 11:00 p.m. to allow the patrons 30 minutes to return home before curfew. Shops opened with signs saying “Business (behind sandbags) as usual.”
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The stiff upper lip was being put to the test.

Despite determined attempts at creating an atmosphere of normalcy, there was no denying that the city was going through its biggest crisis ever and that the future was uncertain. These were not ordinary times after all, and with the hostilities occasionally spilling over the borders into the International Settlement, an inceasing number of people felt it advisable to
make the necessary precautions to stay safe. Defying the gregarious mood that usually characterized the expatriates of Shanghai, many now preferred the safety of their homes. When the Municipal Orchestra organized an evening of classical music at the Nanjing Theater, only two thirds of the seats were filled.
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As if to emphasize the precarious situation, several of the foreign garrisons received large reinforcements, many of them the elite of their respective armies. About 800 Italian Grenadiers of Savoy arrived on September 14, “fresh from conquest in Abyssinia,” as local media put it, with pith helmets adorned with large sun goggles.
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They were followed less than a week later by 1,435 U.S. marines, their flat British-style helmets and campaign hats a reminder of the Corps’ exploits two decades earlier on the battlefields of Europe.
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In the Chinese part of the city, no one even tried to pretend that times were anything but unusual. Military experts said Zhabei received the heaviest bombing ever showered over any piece of land of a similar size.
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Some residents in no-man’s-land in the Hongkou and Yangshupu areas were too frightened by the constant fighting to venture out, and some eventually starved to death in their own homes.
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The Mid-Autumn Festival, one of China’s three major traditional holidays, was on September 19, but all celebrations were canceled due to the war situation.
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Weddings were made simpler by the circumstances. The “ceremony” would often consist of a notice in the local paper announcing that a couple had tied the knot. At the end might be an apology for not informing acquaintances directly: “As addresses of friends and relatives have been changed during the trouble, it is regretted that announcements cannot be individually sent.”
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Refugees were quickly emerging as the single most serious problem for Shanghai’s municipal authorities, foreign as well as Chinese. By September, tens of thousands of people uprooted from their homes in the war-torn countryside north of Suzhou Creek had flooded into the International Set-tlement.
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The leaders of the expatriate community felt that urgent action was needed to care for the growing flood of homeless, both out of genuine humanitarian concern and for fear that foreign property could be damaged.

Jacquinot, the one-armed Jesuit, was actively involved in seeking ways
to mitigate the plight of the refugees, and an idea was gradually forming in his head. He had followed a public debate that had been ongoing since the late 1920s, on the possibility of creating safe zones for civilians in wartime. He believed that possibly such a zone could be formed in Shanghai. He made the proposal in a meeting with Hasegawa Kiyoshi, the com-mander of the Japanese Third Fleet, in late September. Hasegawa was noncommittal, but Jacquinot was determined to move ahead with the plan no matter what.
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The strain that Shanghai was under also had an economic side to it. Although it had been a bumper year for both rice and cotton, the two most popular crops in the area,
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many farmers were unable to harvest because of continued heavy fighting around the city.
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Labor disputes simmered and occasionally broke out into the open. On September 14, a group of workers hired on short-term contracts by the Fou Foong Flour Mill in the western part of the International Settlement locked themselves inside and refused to leave until a demand of 10 months’ salary was met. Police and members of the Reserve Unit, a special anti-riot outfit, attacked the premises with tear gas and managed to dispel the protesters. Later, ambulances had to drive 25 injured males to various hospitals from the mill.
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As if the city was not already suffering enough hardship, a cholera epidemic had broken out and was taking its toll as well, especially among the poorest inhabitants. As of September 13, it had lasted for a month, with 119 confirmed cases and nine deaths.
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Less than a fortnight later, it had infected 646 and killed 97. Once the outbreak had peaked by early October, it had claimed a total of 355 lives.
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These statistics merely marked the tip of the iceberg, as they counted only the patients at hospitals in the International Settlement, leaving out the probably much larger numbers in the Chinese part of the city.
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In a way, they were collateral damage. A doctor who worked with the patients stated with a great degree of certainty that the disease had probably been brought to Shanghai with troops from the south.
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“The white house,” was the Japanese soldiers’ name for the large villa hovering over the flat countryside south of Luodian. The former owner, who had obviously been a man of great riches, had called it “Villa of the Lucky
Plants.” This name was written over the elaborate gateway along with characters extolling the former owner’s ancestors.
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The entire compound was surrounded by a tall white wall, as if to shield the inhabitants’ wealth from the poverty in the countryside all around it. It had become pockmarked and blackened showing signs of intense and prolonged fighting. The Chinese had held the villa for four weeks, refusing to budge. Entrenched outside, the Japanese Army’s 44th Regiment, also known as the Kochi Regiment, was being steadily worn down as attempts at storming the strong-hold had all failed. Regimental commander Wachi Takaji, the sword-wielding colonel who had reaped much honor when leading the capture of Luodian the month before, had been forced into uncharacteristic passivity.
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Over the time that had passed since arriving at Luodian, the regiment had tried repeatedly to take the building, but with no success. Artillery support was limited because difficulties transporting supplies to the frontline meant that each artillery piece was down to only one fifth of its normal daily allowance of ammunition. The Chinese defenders by contrast were well-equipped, and showed off their impressive firepower every time Wachi threw his troops across the 70 yards separating the Japanese trenches from the white walls, cutting down row after row of Japanese soldiers. This situation had lasted for 27 long days. “This concerns the reputation of the Kochi Regiment,” said Wachi. Another solution had to be found.