Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (4 page)

As Japanese commanders prepared for their offensive around Beijing and Tianjin, they pulled out the bulk of the troops stationed at Tongzhou, planning to deploy them in the upcoming assault. This was the opportunity two officers of the auxiliary police, Chinese loyalists at heart, had been waiting for. In the early hours of July 29, they sent their men spilling out into the streets. Long swords glimmered in the faint moonlight as the chilling chant of “Kill! Kill!” echoed down the narrow alleys. Most Japanese men had departed, and what followed was not so much a battle as a massacre. Years of pent-up anger was released in an orgy of blood. The Chinese police officers cut off the arms of old women and raped the young ones, before stabbing their genitals with bayonets. They decapitated others and lowered their heads in wicker baskets from the parapets.
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Japanese soldiers rushing to Tongzhou after the massacre encountered a horrific spectacle. “I saw a mother and child who had been slaughtered. The child’s fingers had been hacked off,” said one of them, Major Katsura Shizuo. He went on to describe the grisly scene at a Japanese store near the
south gate of the city: “The body of a man, probably the owner, who had been dragged outside and killed, had been dumped on the road. His body had been cut open, exposing his ribs and his intestines, which had spilled out onto the ground.”
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A survivor told the
Asahi Shimbun
of the torture inflicted on some of the Japanese civilians before they were killed: “I chanced to see a man being dragged along by a wire. At that time I thought that he was only bound with it, but now I know that it was pierced through his nose.”
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After Tongzhou was recaptured, more carnage followed, but the tables had been turned. Japanese soldiers bent on revenge beheaded all the men they managed to capture, whether rebels or not, and raped the women. When they were done with Tongzhou, they swept the surrounding countryside searching for anyone who looked like a fleeing police officer, hard to determine at a distance, and gunned them down too. Finally, they set the town on fire. It created a dense column of black smoke that could be seen by the horrified residents of Beijing in the following days. Now they knew what life and death under Japanese rule would be like.
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Of the 385 Japanese and Koreans residing in Tongzhou, altogether 223 lost their lives. It appears that no one bothered to count the Chinese casualties, but there is little doubt they reached a comparable number. As horrific as it was, the violence in Tongzhou would quickly pale in comparison with the astonishing atrocities Japanese soldiers proved capable of as they entered China’s great population centers further down the east coast. However, in Tokyo the massacre was described in detail by a jingoistic press and triggered immense public anger. It made de-escalation of the China incident all the more unlikely, even if some in the Japanese hierarchy might still have hoped for a last-minute reversal of the descent into chaos.
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“The mood in the army today,” Hirohito’s brother, Prince Takamatsu, wrote in his diary, “is that we’re really going to smash China, so that it will be ten years before they can stand up straight again.”
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As the Marco Polo Bridge skirmish set northern China ablaze with the rapidity of a prairie fire, Nationalist General Zhang Fakui was attending a routine training course for senior military personnel at Mount Lu in the southeastern province of Jiangxi. Short and small of build, even by the
standards of the time, and with “a tapering pointed face” that made it impossible to call him handsome, Zhang did not stand out in any group. Indeed, when among fellow senior officers, he could easily be confused for an orderly. His physical courage, however, was legendary and had earned him the nickname “Zhang Fei,” after an ancient half-mythical general famous for taking a stand on a bridge and single-handedly facing down an entire enemy army.
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Approaching 41 years of age, Zhang Fakui had spent more than half his life in uniform, fighting first warlords, then Communists and, in a sign of the unpredictable and fast-changing nature of alliances in China, even the Nationalists. It was only a few years before that he had thrown in his lot with rebels campaigning against Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang, who wielded supreme power in the armed forces as chairman of the National Military Council, had forgiven him, and he was put in charge of weeding out Com-munist strongholds in a large area spanning several provinces south of Shanghai. But it was fast becoming clear that the enemy had changed. The Japanese threat loomed large as the summer activities at Mount Lu got underway. With war having broken out in the Beijing area, Zhang watched officers from the northern armies abruptly cut short the training and hastily return home.
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Mount Lu was also Chiang Kai-shek’s summer residence and there, on July 16, he gathered together 150 members of China’s political and cultural elite to discuss strategies for dealing with the Japanese.
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The savvy general-turned-statesman, who had only one year earlier preferred a cautious approach, now advocated staunch determination. “This time we must fight to the end,” Chiang told the participants. Two days later, the first period of the summer training was over, and Chiang met each of the graduating officers, explaining the duties and responsibilities they could expect to assume once the war spread southwards from Beijing, as seemed increasingly likely. Zhang Fakui was told to prepare for operations in the Shanghai area.
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Meanwhile, Chiang’s spy chief, Dai Li, was busy gathering information on Japanese intentions for Shanghai. It was not an easy matter. Dai, one of the most sinister figures of modern Chinese history, had spent vastly more energy and resources in the preceding years suppressing the Communists than spying against the Japanese. As a result, in the critical summer
of 1937, he only had a thin network of agents inside “Little Tokyo,” the Hongkou area of Shanghai dominated by Japanese businesses.
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One was a pawnshop owner and the rest were double agents employed as local staff in the Japanese security apparatus. They could provide nothing but tidbits, rumors and hearsay. Some sounded ominous in the extreme, but there was almost nothing in the way of actual actionable intelligence. One of the double agents reported back a conversation he had carried out with an inebriated Japanese officer in July. “It’s only going to take a few days before Shanghai is going to be ours,” the officer had told the double agent, believing him to be on the same side. “Then your work is going to really get busy all of a sudden.”
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While Chiang was groping in the dark, deprived of the eyes and ears of an efficient intelligence service, he did have at his disposal an army that was at least somewhat better prepared for battle than in 1932. Chastised by the experience of fighting the Japanese, Chiang had set in motion a modernization program that aimed to equip the armed forces with the skills and materiel needed to not just suppress Communist rebels, but also face a modern fighting force supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft.
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He had made headway, but not enough. Serious weaknesses remained, and now there was no time for remedial action.

While in sheer numbers China seemed to be a power to be reckoned with, the figures were deceptive. On the eve of war, the Chinese military consisted of a total of 176 divisions, in principle divided into two brigades of two regiments each.
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However, only about 20 divisions had a full peacetime strength of 10,000 soldiers and officers, while 5,000 men was the norm for the rest. What’s more, Chiang exercised personal control over a mere 31 divisions,
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and he could not count on the allegiance of the others. In order to resist Japan successfully, Chiang would have to rely not just on his skills as a military commander, but also as a builder of fragile coalitions among maverick generals with fierce local loyalties.

Equipment was another issue. The modernization drive was not scheduled to have ended until late 1938, and it showed.
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In every weapon category, from rifles to field artillery, the Chinese were inferior to their Japanese foe, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Domestically made artillery pieces had a shorter range, and substandard steel-making technology caused the gun barrels to overheat adding the risk of explosion to
the mix. Some arms even dated back to imperial times.
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A large proportion of the Chinese infantry had received no proper training in basic tactics, let alone in coordinated operations with armor and artillery. There was one important exception to this sorry state of affairs. The 20 full-strength divisions, all under Chiang’s control, were considered a roughly equal match for the Japanese foe as they had been through rigorous training designed by Chiang’s German advisors, a group of highly skilled professionals, who had attended the Prussian military academies before being steeled in the battles of the Great War less than a generation earlier.
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Chief of the German advisory corps was General Alexander von Falkenhausen, and it is hard to think of anyone more qualified for the job. True, the 58-year-old’s narrow shoulders, curved back and bald vulture’s head lent him an unmilitary, almost avian appearance, but his exterior belied a tough character that in 1918 had earned him his nation’s highest military award, the Pour le Mérite, while assisting Germany’s Ottoman allies against the British in Palestine. Few, if any, German officers knew Asia as he did. His experience with the region stretched right back to the turn of the century. As a young lieutenant in the Third East Asian Infantry Regiment he had taken part in an international coalition of colonial powers that put down the Boxer rebellion in the year 1900. Ten years later, he had been an observant and curious tourist, traveling through Korea, Manchuria and northern China with his wife. From 1912 to 1914, he had been the German Kaiser’s military attaché in Tokyo.
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He was to put his knowledge to good use in the months ahead.

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If China’s ground forces were of uneven quality, this was even truer for its air arm. It was the pride of the Chinese military, and a resource considered so valuable that Chiang avoided sending any of the planes to the north after the Marco Polo Bridge incident. They were a key asset and as such not to be squandered. The hostilities in 1932 had proved to him and his generals that a modern air force was necessary. They had concluded with considerable prescience that leaving the skies to the enemy was simply too dangerous.
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The Chinese government had initiated an ambitious procurement program and set up the Central Aviation School outside Hangzhou, a little more than 100 miles west of Shanghai. Built on an American-
inspired philosophy of rigorous training, its relentless pace winnowed down the aspiring pilots, leaving only the best.

China had more than 600 military aircraft by the middle of 1937, on paper at least.
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The figure was as impressive as it was misleading. The expansion of the air force had mainly been overseen by Italians, which was a mixed blessing. Mussolini’s Fascist government had sent a large number of pilots to China as advisors and had seen to it that its military aircraft manufacturers controlled a major part of the market. This enabled the Chinese to build up its air force at a rate it could not have achieved on its own, but it also gave rise to a number of startling inefficiencies. For starters, the Italian influence had triggered a practice in the Chinese Air Force of adding aircraft to the roster even if they had in reality been reduced to wrecks. This meant that of the 600 aircraft officially forming the air force at the start of the hostilities, only 91 were actually ready to fight. When a senior air force commander told Chiang Kai-shek this unwelcome truth, Chiang threatened to have him executed.
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The training of Chinese pilots provided by the Italian advisers was a disaster of equal magnitude, according to retired U.S. Army Air Force Captain Claire Lee Chennault, who was in China in the summer of 1937 to conduct a survey of the Chinese capabilities. The Italians had set up a separate flight school near the city of Luoyang in central China which, Chennault said, “graduated every Chinese cadet who survived the training course as a full-fledged pilot regardless of his ability.” This had deadly consequences. The American airman watched how “fighter pilots supposedly ready for combat spun in and killed themselves in basic trainers.” “The Chinese Air Force,” Chennault wrote in his diary after a visit to Luoyang, “is not ready for war.”
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The pilots trained at Hangzhou were in a different league. One of them was Gong Yeti, a 22-year-old lieutenant with the Fourth Air Group, who spent the summer of 1937 in intensive training. In the daytime, he would practice flight maneuvers in his Curtiss Hawk III, a modern biplane recently delivered from the United States and mainly used by the Chinese as a dive bomber. At night, he would read
Fighting the Flying Circus
by Eddie Rickenbacker, an American ace who flew in the skies over France during the Great War less than 20 years earlier. The prospect of finally facing the Japanese enemy filled Gong with boyish excitement. Sweeping
down over mock targets near his airfield, he imagined they were Japanese battleships. “War cannot be avoided. The time for revenge has come,” he wrote in his diary on July 13.
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