Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (33 page)

There was no doubt that on October 26 the Japanese threw every available piece of equipment in that section of the front into an all-out effort to take Dachang. The town had, by that point, been reduced almost entirely to rubble, the ancient wall the only indication that it had ever been home to any significant number of people.
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Up to 400 airplanes, including heavy day bombers, attacked Chinese troops in and around Dachang, killing both people and large numbers of pack animals. A western correspondent observing from a distance, later called it the “fiercest ever [battle] waged in Asia up to that time.” It was a “tempest of steel” released by Japanese planes flying lazily over the Chinese positions, guided to their targets by observation balloons spotting any movement on the ground. “The curtain of fire never lifted for a moment from the Chinese trenches,” the correspondent wrote in his memoirs of the Shanghai campaign. “This was no battle among ruins but straight-out positional warfare in open, flat country.”
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After the aerial attack, more than 40 Japanese tanks appeared west of Dachang. The Chinese had nothing that could stop such a force, as they had already withdrawn their artillery to safer positions further behind the front. Their infantry was left to its own devices in the face of the moving wall of enemy armor, and it was overwhelmed.
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The defending divisions, including Zhu Yaohua’s 18th, never had a chance and were crushed by the materially superior foe. After a short fight, the victorious Japanese could march in and claim the town, which was by then a sea of flames.
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Matsui felt deep satisfaction at the sight of the banner of the Rising Sun over the burning ruins of Dachang. “After a month of bitter fighting, today we have finally seen the pay-off,” he wrote in his diary.
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Zhu Yaohua, on the other hand, immediately faced reproaches from his superiors and his peers who thought he could have done more.
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The humiliation was too much to bear. Two days after his defeat at Dachang, he shot himself in the chest, inflicting a mortal wound.
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Even before Dachang fell, and despite the threat to court-martial anyone leaving his post, a general withdrawal of all Chinese forces in the Jiangwan
salient had been underway. As early as the night between October 24 and 25, the divisions inside the salient had been ordered to move baggage trains and support services back southwest across Suzhou Creek, using the Zhongshan Bridge and Jessfield Railway Bridge. As the fighting raged north of Zhabei in the following days, the stream of soldiers, vehicles and pack animals continued, and on the night between October 26 and 27, the Chinese vacated metropolitan Shanghai north of Suzhou Creek entirely. “The enormous Chinese army simply melted away and at dawn the Japanese found themselves facing empty positions,” a foreign journalist wrote. “The two armies were no longer in contact.”
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As the Chinese retreated from Zhabei, they systematically set fire to thousands of Chinese shops and homes, carrying out a scorched earth policy.
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At 7:00 a.m. on October 27, eight narrow arrows of smoke pierced the horizon from one end of Zhabei to the other. Two hours later, they had become “huge black pillars stretching towards the azure sky.”
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By afternoon, a four-mile-long massive wall of smoke towered thousands of feet into the air.
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In the words of a German advisor, it was a fire “of unimaginable extent” which raged out of control for several days and repeatedly threatened to spill over into the International Settlement.
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Refugees who had left Zhabei weeks or months before and hoped to return now the fighting finally appeared to be over were devastated as they saw their homes devoured by a vast sea of flames.
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The Japanese Army, or more precisely the doctrine guiding it in the field, had failed in two respects by letting some of China’s best divisions escape the trap that it itself had set for them. First of all, on the evening of October 26, after taking Dachang, the Japanese columns could have moved onwards across Zhabei all the way to the edge of the International Settlement. Instead, they followed orders and halted at the line they had reached at sunset. “The only explanation for this is the lack of independent thinking among junior Japanese commanders and their fear of erring even in the slightest bit from a plan of attack that had been laid right down to the smallest details,” German advisor Borchardt wrote after returning home from China.
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“Since the Japanese concentrated on rallying and reorganizing their forces after the fall of Dachang,” Borchardt wrote, “they missed an opportunity for a victory so decisive that the Chinese would have been forced to give up their continued resistance in Shanghai.”

If the Japanese committed a first error by leaving a door open that the enemy could escape through, they made themselves guilty of a second error by not even noticing that the enemy was using that door. Although Japanese reconnaissance planes kept a watchful eye on the two main bridges used by the Chinese to escape, and even sent down parachute flares to detect night-time movements, they almost inexplicably failed to spot the Chinese withdrawal.
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The retreat was carried out exactly according to plan. Even the artillery was pulled out to the last piece. This gave the Chinese a chance to occupy prepared positions south of Suzhou Creek and around Nanxiang, and enabled them to fight another day.
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Despite their mistakes, the Japanese initially treated their conquest of Zhabei as a triumph, planting thousands of small Rising Sun flags throughout the ruins of the district. Against this sea of white and red, the only reasonably intact building, the Four Banks’ Warehouse, stood out as a stark reminder that the Chinese had maintained a foothold north of Suzhou Creek. Rumors started spreading that the soldiers inside had sworn to fight to death. The Japanese realized that their victory in Zhabei would look flawed, and even appear like a defeat of sorts, as long as the warehouse was in Chinese hands.
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No one who had met Xie Jinyuan could be in any doubt that he was the perfect choice to lead the battalion that was to stay behind, holed up inside the Four Banks’ Warehouse in a corner of Zhabei, and prove to the public at home and abroad that China remained determined to resist Japanese aggression. The 32-year-old graduate of the elite Central Military Academy, who had been in Shanghai with the 88th Division since the start of the hostilities in August, was a soldier to the core. He stood as straight as a bayonet, and even in a mask he would have been recognized as a military man, said a foreign correspondent who met him. He was, in the correspondent’s words, “modern China stripped for action.”
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The moment Xie Jinyuan received his assignment on the night of October 26, he went straight to the warehouse, and he was pleased with what he saw. It was a virtual fortress. Each of the walls was pockmarked with dozens of rifle slots, so attacking infantry would be met with a wall of rifle fire from the building’s well-protected defenders. It was clear that once the
Japanese arrived, they would surround the building on three sides. Still, a link remained to the International Settlement in the south across Lese Bridge. British forward positions were as close as 40 feet away, and with a bit of stealth, and a little luck, it was likely that the injured could be evacuated under the cover of darkness. Tactically, it was an ideal location.
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However, it could be further improved, and he ordered the soldiers who had already arrived to work through the night to strengthen their positions. They had exactly what they needed just at hand—thousands of large bags filled with wheat and corn, which proved to be excellent substitutes for sandbags.
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Xie Jinyuan’s first challenge was to rally the soldiers of the 524th Regiment’s 1st Battalion, who were to man the positions at the warehouse. It was a complex task, given the short notice, as the companies and platoons were spread all across Zhabei, and some, unaware of the orders their battalion had received, had started moving west along with the rest of the Chinese Army. Throughout the night, Xie and his second-in-command, Yang Ruifu, sent out orderlies through the blazing streets, hoping to locate their men amid the mass of retreating of soldiers. Eventually, they succeeded. By 9:00 a.m. on October 27, the last remaining soldiers of the battalion turned up at the warehouse.
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By then, Xie Jinyuan’s force consisted of slightly over 400 officers and soldiers. It was a tiny number when compared to the might of the Japanese military, and they were put to the test almost immediately.

An advance outpost had sent word back at 7:30 a.m. that it had seen Japanese marines near the North Train Station, and 45 minutes later it reported that the enemy’s flag was flying over that building. The Chinese soldiers were ordered to engage the advancing Japanese, and over the following two hours they made a fighting retreat back towards the warehouse. A brief pause ensued, which the Chinese defenders used to get ready, some taking up positions on the different floors of the warehouse, others crouching behind an outer wall surrounding the building. At 1:00 a.m. a Japanese column approached the warehouse, proudly and confidently marching down the middle of the road behind a large Rising Sun banner. It looked more like a victory parade than a tactical maneuver. Once they were close enough, the Chinese officers ordered their men to fire. Five Japanese soldiers went down, while the rest of the column scrambled for cover.
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Within an hour, the Japanese had gathered enough troops to attempt to take the warehouse by storm. A sizeable force moved in on the building, and put up so much firepower that the Chinese had to abandon the outer wall and withdraw to the warehouse itself. Despite the solid defenses, the crisis was not over, and the attackers seemed to have gained dangerous momentum. At this point, Yang Ruifu, the second-in-command, ordered a dozen soldiers to run to the roof and lob hand grenades at the Japanese from there. This stopped the attack. As the Japanese withdrew, they left behind seven dead.
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Much of the fighting was followed by excited Chinese on the other side of the 60-yard Suzhou Creek. Every time word spread that yet another Japanese soldier had been killed, an unpitying cheer rose from the crowd.
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Foreign correspondents also witnessed the battle from the safe side of Suzhou Creek. They had a front-row seat to the bitter reality of urban combat. One of them noticed how a small group of Japanese was slowly and carefully approaching the warehouse, picking their way through the broken masonry and twisted metal. Crawling from cover to cover, it took them 50 minutes to cover 50 yards. Apparently the Chinese defenders, watching from hidden vantage points, had been monitoring them all along, and once the Japanese party was close enough, they rained hand grenades on them. After the dust had settled, they used their rifles to finish off those who still moved. Several Japanese who crept up to rescue wounded comrades were killed too. It was a war without mercy.
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Even after darkness had fallen over the warehouse, there was no time to sleep. All soldiers were set to work repairing damages and further bolstering their positions. At 7:00 a.m. the following morning, October 28, large numbers of Japanese planes appeared overhead, but they did not drop a single bomb on the warehouse. The defenders told themselves this was because of the machine guns they had placed on top of the building due to a lack of genuine anti-aircraft guns. The proximity of the warehouse to the International Settlement was probably at least as important as it made the Japanese wary of engaging in aerial bombardment, fearing that they could cause a disaster on the scale of “Black Saturday.”
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Shortly before noon, Xie Jinyuan climbed to the roof with his lieutenant, Yang Ruifu. All around them, Zhabei was burning. Dense black smoke rose from thousands of fires, covering the sun entirely. As the two
officers were watching the scene in awe, they noticed a group of Japanese soldiers lingering in the street some distance away. Xie Jinyuan ordered a sentry to hand him his rifle. He lifted the weapon to his cheek, aimed carefully, and squeezed the trigger. As the lone shot echoed across the ruined cityscape, one of the distant silhouettes collapsed to the ground. “Good shot,” a smiling Yang Ruifu said to his commander.
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At 3:00 p.m., the Japanese attempted a second major attack on the warehouse. This time they pulled up five artillery pieces and also posted machine guns on the roofs of adjacent buildings. The defenders came under even greater pressure than the day before, and only after two hours of intense fighting did they succeed in beating back the enemy. Not long after the shooting had died down, bad news arrived. The Japanese had managed to find the water supply and cut if off. Yang Ruifu ordered strict rationing. Each company was to place its water reserves under guard and collect urine in large barrels for use if fires needed to be extinguished.

The number of wounded had started growing, and there was little that could be done for them in the primitive conditions at the warehouse. Through the last remaining phone link, Yang Ruifu organized their transfer across nearby Lese Bridge, through the International Settlement to hospitals in the Chinese part of Shanghai. As a party of medics prepared to leave with the injured, Yang Ruifu had a last order for them. “If anyone asks how many soldiers are inside the Four Banks’ Warehouse, say there are 800,” he told them. “Under no circumstances let anyone know how few we really are. That would embolden the Japanese.” A legend was born—the legend of the “800 Heroes” of Shanghai.
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The battle of Shanghai had arguably always been unwinnable for the Chinese. It was only a matter of time before the Japanese would gain the upper hand by virtue of their material and technological advantage. As the fighting dragged on, and the Japanese gained stronghold after stronghold in the countryside around the city, invariably exacting an immense toll on the defenders, a growing number of Chinese generals started questioning the wisdom of hanging on to a city doomed to fall in the end anyway. They were pushing for a more comprehensive withdrawal, rather than the tactical retreat from Zhabei and Jiangwan that had taken place. Otherwise, thou
sands more would die in vain. Just as seriously, morale could suffer a devastating blow, and China’s ability to continue the fight would be compromised.