Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (3 page)

Prostitution was inextricably linked to Shanghai’s sprawling criminal scene, as were gambling and extortion. It was no surprise that a big city would give rise to organized crime, but Shanghai made “the Chicago of Al Capone appear a staid, almost pious, provincial town,” as the Chinese writer Han Suyin remarked.
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The sinister Green Gang dominated the Shanghai underworld, allowing its members to roam virtually at will. They were the untouchables after they had penetrated deep into the police force. In that capacity, they worked quickly and efficiently to solve all crimes tar
geting expatriates, prompting the foreign authorities to tolerate their presence, however grudgingly.
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On top of all the other hardship that they had to endure, Shanghai’s faceless poverty-stricken masses also experienced the violent political storms that swept across China in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1911, the last dynasty collapsed with startling speed, bringing to an end the two-millennia-old imperial system and setting the stage for long years of chaos. The revolutionaries who brought down the emperor had hoped for a republic in the European mold, but instead the country was plunged into internecine strife by rival warlords. They were the power holders in a corrupt new oligarchy fueled by greed and based on violence, and they coveted Shanghai because of its lucrative opium trade. Consequently, the city changed hands among them several times.

It clearly was not a sustainable situation, neither for Shanghai nor for China. The endless fratricidal wars gave rise in the 1920s to frustrated calls for unification, and as the decade entered its second half, the movement to bring all of China under one government finally gained traction. It found an efficient leader in an ambitious and ruthless officer, who had been educated in Japan but was fiercely patriotic. His name was Chiang Kai-shek. Born in 1887, he exhibited the youth and dynamism that was called for in those turbulent and dangerous times. In 1926, he set out from the south Chinese province of Guangdong at the head of a vast Nationalist army. He headed north with the aim of successively bringing all the provinces under his control as he went along. Shanghai was in his path, and in the spring of 1927 his troops reached the city.

The undisciplined warlord forces holding Shanghai were no real match for Chiang, and they knew it, so they melted away before any serious fighting had even taken place. The Communists were another matter. Despite a tenuous alliance with Chiang, they signaled their intention of taking over Shanghai, using their existing organization in the city to arrange strikes and dispatch armed gangs to patrol the streets. Chiang struck decisively and fiercely, with the help of the feared Green Gang. Labor activists taken prisoner were beheaded or thrown alive into the furnaces of locomotives. One union leader was beaten only half to death, before being thrown into a pit and buried alive.
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The crackdown was so brutally complete that Communism would not gain a serious foothold in Shanghai
again until the late 1940s. The criminal underworld, on the other hand, was as strong as ever.

The 1927 killings had overwhelmingly taken place in the Chinese part of Shanghai, as had the short war with Japan that broke out five years later. In January 1932, maverick Japanese officers who were already busy establishing an informal empire in the northeast of China, now set their sights on Shanghai. They paid Chinese thugs to attack a group of Japanese priests, and then, in “retaliation,” sent members of the Special Landing Force, the empire’s marines, from the International Settlement to Zhabei to teach the Chinese a lesson. As Japanese motorcycles raced up and down the streets, spraying facades with their mounted machine guns, they were met with fire from Chinese snipers. Some were regular soldiers, others members of the Green Gang, all acting together in loose coordination.
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Japan poured in more troops, and so did China. The Chinese reinforcements included the elite 87th and 88th Divisions, equipped with modern German materiel and trained by battle-hardened advisors from Germany. The Germans had brought with them to the East the deadly tactics of the Great War and taught their Chinese apprentices how to prepare near-impregnable defenses consisting of deep trenches protected by thick walls of sandbags and dense forests of barbed wire. These worked to deadly effect. Japan’s infantry was caught in the crossfire of machine guns and cut down mercilessly. Its tanks had little room to maneuver in the narrow streets and often found themselves trapped like bleeding bulls in the arena, blinded and waiting for death.

Over more than a month of fighting, the center of the battle remained at Zhabei. Japanese technological superiority, which had initially counted for little, eventually reached a critical mass sufficient to tilt the balance. Shelling by naval vessels anchored in Huangpu River reduced large parts of the district to smoldering ruins. Biplanes finished the job, flying sortie after sortie over the rubble to indiscriminately drop bombs and strafe anything that moved, whether in uniform or not. The targeting of unarmed civilians triggered outrage across a world not yet inured to the harsh reality of terror bombing.
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The final blow to Chinese resistance came in late February, when a Japanese division launched a surprise landing on the banks of the Yangtze, north of Shanghai, attacking the defenders from the rear. By early March,
when diplomacy took over, half a million residents had been turned into homeless refugees. At least 4,000 Chinese soldiers and hundreds of Japanese had lost their lives.
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It was the deadliest international conflict involving China since the Boxer Uprising, an anti-foreign rebellion that had shaken the waning empire in the year 1900. Even so, it was only a modest dress rehearsal for much greater horrors that were to follow five years later.

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In mid-July 1937, retired Dutch Colonel Henri Johan Diederick de Fremery was holidaying at a resort in the Diamond Mountains in the Japanese colony of Korea. He was taking a break from his job as military advisor to the Chinese government, which preferred Germans but welcomed experienced officers from other western nations as well. One morning he woke up to see the Rising Sun flag flying at his hotel. When he inquired why, the reply was prompt: “Because of the war with China,” he was told. The Dutchman’s assignment, which had so far been a fairly pleasant sinecure, was about to become much busier. Within a few weeks, the 62-year-old former artillery officer would be spying on the Japanese military on behalf of the Royal Netherlands Indies Army.
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That fateful summer, the world’s attention was riveted not on Shanghai, but on Beijing, which was directly on the frontline of China’s desperate struggle with a Japanese Empire driven by voracious ambitions on the Asian mainland. Since the turn of the century, Japanese military and civilian officials had become convinced that control over north China’s plentiful resources, especially coal and iron ore, would offer long-term security in the incessant competition with the older empires of the West. Increasingly, they had also come to consider the area a potential buffer zone against the Soviet threat. Taking Manchuria, China’s northeastern provinces that bordered Japan’s possessions in Korea, had seemed the logical first step.
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The Japanese had struck in 1931, blowing up a railway line that they themselves owned in Manchuria. They used this as a pretext to invade the region and set up a puppet state, which they called Manchukuo. They then gradually pushed their influence further, showing every sign that they planned to devour all of northern China little by little. In 1935 they had wrested control of 22 counties in eastern Hebei province, right at the gates of Beijing, and had established the “East Hebei Autonomous Govern
ment.” Meanwhile, Japanese officers had begun making public statements suggesting that China’s five northernmost provinces ought to be separated from the rest of the country and placed under Japanese control.
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One of the justifications was that China had ceased to exist as a functioning state and, therefore, was little different from the resource-rich areas of Africa and Asia that the western colonial powers had divided among them.

Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of most of China since 1927, had adopted a strategy of yielding to Japan until he was strong enough to offer serious resistance. It was a policy he felt he was forced to adopt. China was poorly developed and not ready for war, and he himself enjoyed only imperfect control of his own country, having entered into tenuous alliances with local warlords in regions where his own influence was limited. His weakness was further emphasized by his inability to stamp out the Communist rebel movement. Despite the ferocity of the crackdown in Shanghai, pockets of Red resistance remained throughout the countryside. Chiang wanted to eradicate this threat before taking on Japan. He held the view that he couldn’t go to war if he had to constantly watch his back too.

However, he was under growing pressure from powerful north Chinese leaders who felt the threat from Japan in a much more immediate fashion than he did and longed to put an end to the island empire’s continued territorial expansion. In late 1936, the most prominent of these leaders took advantage of a visit by Chiang by kidnapping him and keeping him under house arrest until he committed to a more serious effort at reining in Japan. Chiang later imprisoned his kidnapper, but he kept his promise to stand up to the Japanese challenge, sensing that public opinion could no longer stomach appeasement. As a result, it was a more determined Chiang who led China as the situation gradually deteriorated in the first half of 1937.

Japan was no less determined. In the summer of that year, Japanese soldiers stationed in Hebei province along the border of Tokyo’s informal Chinese Empire performed frequent maneuvers, mostly after sunset. They did so even in the vicinity of Chinese-controlled Beijing, where they, like the militaries of other major foreign powers, were allowed to maintain a limited presence. The maneuvers marked a routine meant to both maintain their level of military preparedness and at the same time intimidate anyone who might be bold enough to defy them. By late June, the Japanese drills had become nearly nightly occurrences, and the Chinese authorities had
felt compelled to impose a curfew on the civilian population to avoid any unmanageable incidents.
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Therefore, no one took any particular notice when on the evening of July 7 a Japanese company garrisoned at the town of Fengtai near Beijing set out for a night of exercises near the Marco Polo Bridge, named after the Venetian merchant who had mentioned it 600 years earlier in his memoirs. As the Japanese soldiers moved around warily in pitch-black darkness, a number of shots rang through the warm air. Apparently, they were fired by a group of Chinese soldiers camped nearby. Apprehension among the Japanese grew when the officers carried out a count and found one soldier missing.

The Japanese assumed the soldier was being held captive in the Chinese camp and went searching for him. As tense soldiers fanned out into the night, fingers on triggers, incidents were bound to happen. Scattered fighting erupted around the bridge, and the Japanese reinforcements that arrived in the following hours began shelling the nearby walled city of Wanping. In the meantime, the missing soldier had turned up, apparently having made an unauthorized visit to a brothel. By then it was too late. The battle had started. There were dead and injured on both sides. A dangerous line had been crossed.

Chinese and Japanese officers started negotiations to contain the crisis. After four days, they eventually managed to hammer out a truce. It was a wasted effort. The ceasefire was undermined from the start by mutual loathing and suspicion, and both sides took measures that could only escalate the conflict. On the same day that the truce was signed in China, the Japanese cabinet decided to reinforce the troops in the area around Beijing with units from Manchukuo, Korea and the home islands. The intention, abetted by Emperor Hirohito, was, in language that had already become well known, “to teach China a lesson” by subduing Chinese forces around Beijing and the nearby port city of Tianjin. The day after, Chiang Kai-shek sent a cable to the 19th Army, one of the main units stationed in the north, stating that “I am now determined to declare war on Japan.”
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Once the Japanese reinforcements were in place at the end of July, an imperial order was issued instructing the local commander to “chastise the Chinese Army in the Beijing-Tianjin area.”
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The well-equipped Japanese units unleashed a series of coordinated attacks, with extraordinarily bloody
results in some places. Chinese soldiers manning a barracks south of Beijing were nearly wiped out, and when a thin column of survivors tried to escape north through the fields towards the city, they were chopped to pieces by Japanese heavy machine guns placed in advance along the escape route. The injured soldiers were left to die slow agonizing deaths under the scorching sun, as unfeeling peasants collected bayonets and other equipment useful for their work.
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East of Beijing, along the road to Tianjin, an incident occurred that served as an ominous forewarning of the kind of war that had now started. The setting was Tongzhou, an ancient town surrounded by thick brick walls and protected by heavy wooden gates. Recently, it had become the seat of the puppet “East Hebei Autonomous Government.” Although the town was officially run by Chinese administrators and protected by an indigenous auxiliary police force, they were not the real rulers. The Japanese Empire was represented both by regular soldiers and by members of the feared secret police, the Kempeitai. In addition, there were nearly 400 Japanese and Korean civilians, some of them prostitutes servicing the garrison, others businesspeople with their families. This foreign presence was resented by the Chinese. Even members of the auxiliary police, who were ostensibly allies of Japan, secretly loathed their masters.