Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (32 page)

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The battle might not have been going China’s way, but its diplomatic behavior in mid-autumn showed continued confidence. World public opinion, at least in the democratic nations, was largely on China’s side, and calls were growing for Japan to pay for its aggressive behavior. On October 5, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a speech in Chicago that, albeit in veiled figurative language, called for concrete steps to be taken against Japan. “It would seem to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading,” Roosevelt said. “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread the community approves and
joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the community against the spread of the disease.”
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Coinciding almost exactly with Roosevelt’s speech, Chiang Kai-shek instructed his foreign ministry to push for international sanctions against Japan with the aim of depriving the resource-starved island nation of oil, iron and steel—raw materials necessary for waging war. The League of Nations had proven an inefficient tool for rallying support for concrete measures against Japan. The Chinese diplomats also had few hopes of any tangible results coming out of the conference in Brussels. However, they felt some confidence that a conciliatory Chinese tone at the conference could help win sympathy. That way, Japan would appear to be the inflexible party, and the road to sanctions would be cleared.
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Optimistic that deft diplomacy could come to China’s rescue, Chiang Kai-shek was not in a mood to settle for peace at any price. On October 21, Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki approached the German ambassador in Tokyo, Herbert von Dirksen, with an inquiry about China’s willingness to negotiate. Germany declared it was prepared to act as mediator, and in response the Japanese government laid out its demands. These included, among other things, important Chinese concessions in the north of the country as well as an expanded demilitarized zone around Shanghai. Even so, the German go-betweens considered the requests rather moderate, and Oskar Trautmann, Berlin’s ambassador in Nanjing, conveyed them to Chiang Kai-shek.

Initially, Chiang did not reveal his views, but instead asked the German envoy about his. Trautmann said he considered the Japanese demands a basis for further talks, and used the example of Germany in the Great War as a warning. The sorry end that Imperial Germany met showed that it was unwise to postpone negotiations until complete military exhaustion had set in. Once that point had been reached, participation in any talks would take place from a disadvantaged position. Chiang was not convinced. He replied that he could only accept negotiations with the Japanese if they were willing first to restore the situation to its pre-hostilities state. There was little room for compromise.
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Once the long-expected Guangxi troops had all arrived at the front by the
middle of October, the southern general Bai Chongxi’s plan for the counterattack into the Japanese right flank picked up speed. Participants at a meeting of the National Military Council agreed on the need to act fast. “By seizing the opportunity to strike at the enemy at his moment of fatigue,” they said, “it will be possible to break through the troops that have already advanced across Wusong Creek.”
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The attack was set for October 21. It would begin in the evening, so the Chinese could take advantage of their natural ally, darkness, in the initial period of the operations.

In the days that remained, the Chinese prepared their assault force. It was built around a core consisting of the four Guangxi divisions, which were extricated from the battle around Chenjiahang. This created an accumulation of troops behind the Chinese front that the Japanese reconnaissance planes could not help but notice. “The enemy will launch a counterattack along the entire front tonight. It seems the planned attack is mainly targeted at the area south of Wusong Creek,” Matsui wrote in his diary on October 21, just hours before the Chinese moved. He actually welcomed the prospect. “It will give us an opportunity to catch the enemy outside of his prepared defenses, and kill him there.”
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At 7:00 p.m., the Chinese artillery barrage began. One hour later, the troops started moving east. The left wing of the Chinese attack, north of Wusong Creek, was led by the 176th Guangxi Division. At first, it made rapid progress, but soon it ran into the same obstacles that caused any attacker in this area, whether Chinese or Japanese, to lose speed—creeks and canals cutting through the country everywhere, at all angles. The vanguard feared that if it moved too fast, the supply train would not be able to keep up, and as dawn approached, it gave up much of the ground it had gained, hoping to take it back the following night.
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The attack south of Wusong Creek, led by the 174th Guangxi Division, did not fare any better. It ran into unexpectedly strong enemy resistance, and was unable to force its way across the canals it encountered, as bridge-building material had not been prepared in sufficient quantities. Before dawn, fearing artillery and air attack, that division, too, decided to withdraw back behind the start line, abandoning all the territory it had won at the cost of much blood during the night. On both sides of the creek, the Chinese divisions dug in, hoping to be able to stand their ground during the dangerous daylight hours when the Japanese could
enjoy the full advantage of their superiority in the air.

As expected, the counterattack came after sunrise on October 22. In the 176th Guangxi Division’s sector north of the creek, the Japanese had surrounded an entire battalion before noon. A few hours later, they had wiped it out completely, every man from the battalion commander down. The main success that day was scored by a Guangxi unit subjected to an attack by Japanese infantry supported by five tanks. Their front initially was close to collapsing, but a hastily arranged defense succeeded in beating back the Japanese. Of the tanks, one was destroyed, two were stuck in a canal, and two retreated—testimony to the near-impossibility of tank warfare in the river country around Shanghai.
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The night between October 22 and 23 saw the Chinese move under the cover of darkness to take back some of the positions they had lost during the daytime. Then dawn broke over the last and crucial day of the Chinese attack. This time the Japanese were mobilizing all available resources to stop the advance, as the commanders of the Guangxi troops commented later in the after-action report. “The Japanese enemy’s army and air force employed every kind of weapon, from artillery to tanks and poison gas,” it said. “It hit the Chinese front like a hurricane, and resulted in the most horrific losses yet for the army group since it entered the battle.”
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From the moment the sun rose, the Japanese airplanes were in the air. At 9:00 a.m., they descended on the soldiers of the already severely battered 174th Guangxi Division south of Wusong Creek. A Guangxi general who survived the attack described what happened: “The troops were either blown to pieces or buried in their dugouts. The 174th disintegrated into a state of chaos.” Other units were chopped up in similar fashion. By the end of October 23, the Chinese operation had cost a huge number of casualties including two brigade commanders, six regimental commanders, dozens of battalion and company commanders and 2,000 soldiers. Three out of every five Chinese soldiers in the first wave had been either killed or injured. The assault had to be halted.
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The entire counterattack had been a fiasco. Some Guangxi veterans would hold grudges for years against the officers who sent them into a hopeless battle. First of all, they had chosen to attack the enemy in the wrong place, hitting him exactly where he was at his strongest. Despite the recent reinforcements, the Japanese remained undermanned in the Shang
hai area, and to gain a critical mass in a frontal attack like the one across Wusong Creek, they had to stretch their troops thin everywhere else. A powerful Chinese counterattack further north would have had a much better chance of succeeding. “But Bai Chongxi wanted to punch through the center of the enemy forces to show the fighting ability of the Chinese Army to the world,” Lan Xiangshan, a Guangxi officer, wrote later in his memoirs.
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With hindsight, it was obvious that it had been an impossible mission, and it had been launched with a minimum of preparation. According to a possibly apocryphal claim made by Lan Xiangshan, when Bai Chongxi outlined the attack on a map, he did not pay any attention to the scale, resulting in far too large a front for the two divisions leading the charge. There was also little reconnaissance undertaken, and not enough engineering materiel to overcome the numerous waterways that the troops encountered. Most seriously, the commanders had picked troops entirely unsuited for an undertaking of this difficulty. Many of the Guangxi troops had been absorbed from local militia-type units with very little actual combat experience. Ignorant and incompetent leadership “had forced the Guangxi troops to make extreme sacrifices,” Lan Xiangshan wrote. “And it had all been for nothing.”
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To the German advisors, the Chinese practice of sending new troops straight to the frontline, and often to the most critical sectors, was also a cause of dismay. In the desperate situation faced by the Chinese generals, with a front that could buckle at any time, it was perhaps understandable, but in light of the need to preserve forces for a protracted war, it did not make sense in the long term. Freshly arrived in the Shanghai area, reinforcements from elsewhere in China invariably faced a situation that was completely alien to them, and without proper preparation for warfare in the special terrain offered in an unfamiliar part of the country, they were at a severe disadvantage. As a result they suffered enormous losses.
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T
HE FRONT WAS COLLAPSING
. T
HAT MUCH WAS CLEAR TO
Z
HANG
Boting as he rode in his staff car west out of Shanghai on his way to his high-level rendezvous. Stragglers and small groups of injured soldiers staggered along the road, which ran parallel with the railway to Nanjing, away from the city and away from danger. It was a chaotic scene. Discipline among the scattered groups of military men was breaking down. That made them easier targets. Enemy aircraft were constantly circling in the sky, scouting for prey on the ground below. Whenever the pilots spotted a cluster of Chinese soldiers, they swept down, nearly touching the treetops, and strafed them mercilessly. Zhang’s own driver had to stop the vehicle repeatedly to take cover.
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Zhang Boting was the 27-year-old chief of staff of the 88th Infantry Division, the German-trained elite unit that had been fighting in the area around the North Train Station since the start of the battle. On the morning of October 26, the same day as he was traveling to his meeting, the Third War Zone deputy commander Gu Zhutong had called Sun Yuan-liang, who had led the division in battle since its arrival in August. Gu Zhutong had surprising news. As everyone had suspected, the Chinese Army was about to withdraw from northern Shanghai. However, the plan was to carve the 88th Division into smaller independent units and have
them stay behind in Zhabei to wage guerrilla-style warfare behind enemy lines. Sun Yuanliang thought it would be a pointless waste of the soldiers, but he was unable to explain his thoughts on the matter fully over the telephone. Instead, he dispatched Zhang Boting.

After several miles, which felt longer than they were because of the constant air raids, Zhang’s car stopped by a narrow river. He got out and walked for another two miles until he came to a small straw hut. It looked innocuous from the outside, but looks were deceptive and the entire battle of Shanghai was being waged from inside. It was Gu Zhutong’s field head-quarters. When Zhang Boting entered, Gu Zhutong was studying a map of the deteriorating situation in and around the city. Zhang Boting gave an account of the situation at the front and at the same time described the conditions he had witnessed on the way to the meeting. He urged Gu Zhutong to immediately withdraw his headquarters to a safer place. They then moved on to the main topic.

“Chiang Kai-shek wants your division to stay in Zhabei and fight,” Gu Zhutong said. “Every company, every platoon, every squad is to defend key buildings in the city area, and villages in the suburbs. You must fight for every inch of land and make the enemy pay a high price. You should launch guerrilla warfare, to win time and gain sympathy among our friends abroad.” The command was more about diplomacy than war-winning tactics. The so-called Nine Power Conference was set to meet in Brussels the following week,
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and it was important that China kept a presence in Shanghai, as the foreigners would immediately appreciate the importance of the city. If the war had moved on to unknown hamlets in the Chinese countryside by the time the delegates met in Brussels, it would be harder to convince them of the urgency of the matter. It all made sense politically, but not militarily. Zhang Boting asked permission to speak.

“Outside of the streets of Zhabei,” he said, “the suburbs consist of flat land with little opportunity for cover. It’s not suitable for guerrilla warfare. The idea of defending small key points is also difficult. The 88th Division has so far had reinforcements and replacements six times, and the original core of officers and soldiers now make up only 20 to 30 percent. It’s like a cup of tea. If you keep adding water, it becomes thinner and thinner.
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Some of the new soldiers we receive have never been in a battle, or never even fired a shot. At the moment we rely on the backbone of old soldiers
to train them while fighting. As long as the command system is in place and we can use the old hands to provide leadership, we’ll be able to maintain the division as a fighting force. But if we divide up the unit, the coherence will be lost. Letting every unit fight its own fight will just add to the trouble.”

Gu Zhutong nodded, but asked what alternatives were available. “Chiang Kai-shek’s instruction is aimed at strategic objectives,” said Zhang Boting. “He wants to direct attention towards Japan’s aggressive behavior, and since Shanghai is an international city which has the eyes and ears of the global community, he wants to bring the realities of the combat in Shanghai to the (Brussels) meeting . . . Leaving troops in Zhabei for a final battle will be tantamount to sacrificing them, whether it’s a large force or a small one. Whether we stay and fight for a large number of strongholds or just one or two strongholds, it has the same meaning: We stay and fight. The most important thing is to pick a unit that is just right for doing this job.”

“Sun Yuanliang made similar comments on the phone this morning,” Gu Zhutong said, “but he didn’t specifically say how many troops we should leave behind. He also didn’t say which strongholds they should defend.” Zhang Boting replied that an elite formation of no more than regimental size would be enough to hold on to one or two high-profile positions in the Zhabei area. Gu Zhutong thought it over quickly, and then made up his mind. “Time is short,” he told Zhang Boting. “I want you to immediately return to Sun Yuanliang and order him to proceed according to this plan. If you have carried out the necessary arrangements by evening, I will be able to report back to Chiang Kai-shek.”

Zhang Boting rushed back east towards Shanghai, but the road had become even more clogged and disorganized than before. Near a major bridge, he encountered a huge traffic jam caused by vehicles of all sizes seeking to escape the advancing Japanese. An old friend of his, an officer of the 87th Infantry Division, came up to him. His left hand was bandaged and he was waving a submachine gun with his right. It was impossible to continue this way, he told Zhang. The Japanese had already broken through the line to the north, and an enemy tank column was heading in their direction.

Zhang Boting decided to make a detour and told his driver to take the
car to the International Settlement. From there he hitched a ride across Suzhou Creek on board a small wooden boat. When he returned to the 88th Infantry Division’s headquarters, inside the Four Banks’ Warehouse right next to the creek, he found Sun Yuanliang pacing up and down the floor, as was his habit when he was pondering a tough issue. He had already talked to Gu Zhutong by telephone, and knew that his proposal to keep a small force in Shanghai had been adopted. What remained was to pick the unit that was to stay behind and in all likelihood fight to the last man.

Suddenly, Sun Yuanliang stopped pacing, a sign that he had reached a decision. He wanted the very building they were standing in, the five-storey Four Banks’ Warehouse, to be the position where the last stand was to be made. It was a large and easily recognizable structure, and it was within direct sight of the International Settlement, giving it exactly the exposure that was its raison d’etre. However, Sun Yuanliang thought a regiment was too big a unit for the job. It would be hard to supply so many men for a prolonged period of battle. More importantly, he was loath to squander so many lives on what was essentially a public relations exercise. Sun Yuan-liang had made his pick. The task of showing to the world that there was still fight left in the Chinese had fallen on the 1st Battalion of the 524th Regiment. It was about to gain global fame as China’s “Lost Battalion.”

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By the time Zhang Boting made his trek on October 26, the situation west of Shanghai had changed markedly. The stalemate around Wusong Creek that had characterized most of the month of October had given way to sudden, rapid movement. The 9th Japanese Division’s successful defense against the counterattack carried out by the Guangxi troops from October 21 to 23 had shaken the Chinese, as had minor Japanese advances elsewhere. On the night between October 23 and 24, intelligence reached Matsui Iwane suggesting that the Chinese were reducing their troops on the frontline, possibly in preparation of a withdrawal.
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Matsui had been planning for the major drive south aiming for Dachang, and the sudden fluidity of the situation prompted him to speed up these plans. He had originally wanted to call a meeting with the division commanders and explain his intentions, but instead he phoned each of them from 9:00 a.m. on October 24 ordering the attack, stating that more
detailed written orders would follow in the afternoon. Within just a few hours both the 3rd and the 9th Divisions managed to reach Zoumatang Creek, which ran from the west to the east two miles south of Wusong Creek. The 9th Division even succeeded in gaining a foothold on the other side.
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However, Matsui was not satisfied and felt his troops could have moved in a more aggressive manner in pursuit of the retreating Chinese. He reasoned that they had been hampered by Zoumatang Creek, a natural obstacle, but more importantly he believed the weeks that the soldiers had spent in the trenches had caused them to lose their feel for mobile warfare.
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In the middle of the afternoon on October 24, he ordered the divi-sional commanders to meet him at his headquarters. They all seemed to appreciate the need for speed, but they explained that lack of supplies caused them to move slower than they wanted. In particular, the 9th Division was still waiting for new weapons. At present, it only had between 200 and 300 rifles per battalion, and it was not equipped for effective pursuit of the enemy.
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It is also likely that after heavy attrition and the loss of some of their best troops, the Japanese officers had adopted a more cautious approach to battle. Understandably, they did not spell this out to their commander.
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In preparation for the battle, Japanese planes had dropped thousands of leaflets over Chinese positions, urging the soldiers to give up the fight. As an added incentive, the leaflets offered each soldier who laid down his arms five Chinese yuan, or the equivalent of about one and a half U.S. dollars at the exchange rate of the time.
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The tactic did not appear to have had much of an impact, if for no other reason then because all the Chinese were aware that the Japanese rarely, if ever, took prisoners. Rather, the Japanese advance benefited from a continued Chinese withdrawal on the night between October 24 and 25, which also pulled out of battle the Guangxi troops who had been pushed to near exhaustion by an intense week on the frontline. Most of the retreating troops moved to positions that had already been prepared north and south of Suzhou Creek, the last remaining natural obstacle to a Japanese victory in Shanghai.

As had happened before during the Shanghai campaign, in the first hours after daybreak on October 25, the Japanese did not immediately detect the changes that had taken place in the dark hours, and only gradually
realized that the Chinese positions they were facing were occupied by skeleton crews. But once reconnaissance troops had established how weak the enemy in the immediate frontline was, they quickly attacked and wiped out the token resistance left in their path.
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The Japanese took advantage of their superiority in the air, deploying hundreds of planes. They also carried out “creeping” artillery fire, perhaps for the only time during the entire Shanghai campaign. The procedure, which had been used to considerable effect during the Great War, called for a barrage of artillery shells to gradually move forward, protecting the assault force following immediately behind. However, in this case, the barrage was kept 600 to 700 yards in front of the advancing Japanese and gave the Chinese defenders sufficient time to emerge from cover and re-man the positions they had abandoned while under artillery fire.
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Despite the general withdrawal from the positions south of Wusong Creek, several Chinese divisions were charged with mounting a strong defense around Dachang. Two strategic bridges across Zoumatang Creek, in the area west of Dachang, were held by one division each. The defense of the westernmost of the two, Old Man Bridge, was the responsibility of the 33rd Division, which had recently arrived in Shanghai. The 18th Division, another new arrival, was positioned around Little Stone Bridge, closer to Dachang. Neither division was any match for the Japanese steamroller. On October 25, a Japanese column spearheaded by more than 20 tanks swept away the 33rd Division’s defenses and took Old Man Bridge. In the ensuing hours, as the Chinese division tried to carry out a fighting retreat towards Dachang, it was nearly annihilated by the superior Japanese firepower. By mid-afternoon only one in ten of its officers and men was fit to fight. Even the division commander had been injured.
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The Japanese force moved on to Little Stone Bridge, and after bitter fighting with the 18th Division, which lasted until sunset, that bridge too ended up in Japanese hands. The 18th Division, meanwhile, moved into Dachang. Here the division commander Zhu Yaohua received a message from Gu Zhutong pointing out in terms hard to misunderstand that Dachang must be held at any cost. “Those who disobey this order will be court-martialed,” Gu Zhutong stated curtly.
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Zhu Yaohua feared that giving up Little Stone Bridge might already be enough to put him in the dock and hastily arranged a nightly counterattack to recapture it. It turned
out the Japanese had foreseen that eventuality and had prepared strong defenses near the bridge. The Chinese attempt failed miserably.
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