Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (40 page)

In the pitch-black night, chaos and confusion reigned, and friend and foe became hard to distinguish as both milled around in the dark forest on the hillside. A guard searched the area around the building where the division commander was hiding when he suddenly stumbled upon two sleeping Chinese, still clutching their rifles. He and other guards led them away and killed them.
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A few hours before dawn, a Japanese machine gun squad was climbing the slopes of the observatory hill. The squad commander
sensed that there were too many men in the squad. He turned around and made a count, and discovered that the last two in the group did not belong. “They are Chinese!” a private exclaimed. “Bastards,” the squad commander yelled, striking the head of the first Chinese with his rifle butt. They killed the two enemy soldiers before unceremoniously kicking their bodies down the slope.
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As the sun rose over Sheshan, division commander Tani Hisao staggered out of the building where he had been holed up during the night. He walked over to a machine gun nest that offered a good view of the landscape below. His uniform smattered in mud and his broken glasses held up crudely with a piece of string, he peeped down. “What a lot of people,” he mumbled. The battlefield was littered with bodies, the vast majority of them Chinese. Some were lying on the road, others in the ditch on either side or scattered throughout the surrounding rice fields. There were hundreds.
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A Japanese officer descending the hill to inspect the scene noticed something stirring inside an untidy and bloody pile of corpses. A Chinese soldier crawled out, got on his feet and, when he saw he was surrounded by enemies, drew his gun and shot himself. “He is an enemy, but he has made himself worthy of admiration,” the officer said with an approving nod of his head.
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A little distance away, men from the division went to a stream to fetch water for their rice. The surface was covered with a tangled mass of dead bodies, but if the Japanese soldiers cared, they did not show it. They were hungry, and they had to eat.
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The Chinese retreat from Shanghai began in an orderly fashion. At 10:00 a.m. on November 9, the last soldiers to pull out marched in neat rows past St Ignatius Cathedral and its thousands of refugees, heading southwest out of the city they had been fighting for over a period of nearly three months. On their way out, they burned down major properties that could be of potential use to the city’s new masters, including factories, coal yards and even a number of foreign homes. With particular glee, they also set fire to the huge Toyoda Cotton Mills, for years a symbol of Japan’s growing presence in the Yangtze Delta.
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Initially, the withdrawal looked as if it would be as disciplined as the withdrawals that had taken the Japanese
aback time and again during the previous months. It was not to be.

The Japanese were in hot pursuit, and by noon they had taken possession of Hongqiao Airfield, the scene of the shooting that had unleashed the battle in August. They were determined to impose maximum damage on the weakened enemy. Planes took off incessantly from aircraft carriers anchored off Shanghai, machine-gunning roads tightly jammed with retreating infantry. The Japanese Air Force also bombed bridges and train stations, shelled already battered transportation networks, and destroyed telephone and telegraph lines. With communications interrupted, save for the odd field radio, the Chinese were at a severe disadvantage. Runners were sent out to scattered units but were killed or got lost. Some deserted.
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Coordination became next to impossible, and for the first time in the campaign, a pull-out disintegrated into a mad stampede with each individual soldier consumed by the hope of personal survival. As everyone was struggling to get out at the same time, the result was a slowdown, in some cases paralysis. Once panic started spreading among the troops, there was nothing the officers could do to rein it in. Earlier withdrawals had been of a more limited tactical nature. This time the operation was of an entirely different magnitude and difficulty, as hundreds of thousands of troops were forced to move along a narrowing strip of land between the two Japanese pincers. It was something the staff officers had never been trained for.
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None of the Chinese were under any illusion about what would happen to them if they fell into Japanese hands. As the battle seemed lost, deserters acting alone or in small groups were scrambling for ways to gain entry into the foreign areas. Some achieved safety by forcing their way at gunpoint. Others pretended to be civilians. A foreign correspondent watched how one Chinese soldier standing under a bridge over Siccawei Creek on the border of the French Concession threw away his rifle and revolver and took off his tunic and pants. He then jumped into the foul-smelling stream only dressed in white underwear, and waded across the waist-deep muck, to be let in by the French guards on the other side.
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Senior Chinese officers, who did not expect their rank to offer them any special protection if they were caught by the Japanese, were forced to resort to similar methods. Ye Zhao, a general who had arrived in Shanghai with his south Chinese troops earlier in the battle, was retreating with his staff when he came across a deserted farm building west of the city. There
he helped himself to a set of used peasant clothes. Shortly afterwards, he was overtaken by the advancing Japanese, who had no idea of his true identity and impressed him as a porter. That way he was able to survive and eventually escape back to Shanghai.
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Zhang Fakui also escaped along chaotic roads to Qingpu, but could go no further without specific orders. He was preparing to stay there and had quietly reconciled himself with the thought that he would be taken prisoner by the Japanese. He phoned Gu Zhutong, the deputy commander of the Third War Zone, at the same time as Gu was talking to Chiang Kai-shek on another phone. Chiang overheard Zhang Fakui asking where to go next, and on the spur of the moment ordered him to move further to Suzhou. “That’s why I say that although Christians should not believe in fate, sometimes it is really all a matter of fate,” Zhang Fakui said, looking back.
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The Japanese were approaching Nanshi, the southern and predominantly Chinese part of Shanghai, and it was time for a last reckoning before the district fell. A group of Chinese who had been found guilty of spying on behalf of the Japanese were lined up in the afternoon sun and executed by firing squad. An officer, a dapper dresser who seemed to have spent most of his time far behind the front, went from body to body and delivered a shot to the back of the head of each convict. Hundreds of onlookers—men, women and children—watched in silence.
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As the government packed up and prepared to leave, it urged the residents to carry on the fight, and in particular pay attention to enemies in their midst. “People should guard against the activities of traitors and puppets, and the best way to do it is to build a solid spiritual Great Wall,” said a ranking official before departing.
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The people of Shanghai did take matters into their own hands, sometimes with fateful consequences. A 31-year-old Chinese who had returned from studies in Germany and had retained a foreign appearance was attacked by a mob believing him to be Japanese. When he produced a Chinese ID card, he was accused of being a spy. He was beaten with two wooden sticks, and even though police ran to his rescue, they could not save him in time. He died on his way to hospital.
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The haste of the Chinese Army’s retreat came as a shock to many civilian residents of Shanghai. They had thought the city could be held for months, perhaps even indefinitely. Instead, it fell in the course of a few
hectic days, leaving no time to flee anywhere. Thousands of desperate men and women, weighed down by their belongings, turned up at the bridges leading to the French Concession, begging on their knees to be let in. They were met by French police, reinforced by tanks, who ordered them to turn around. When they would not listen, they commanded local Chinese in their employ to drive the crowd away. “Old and young and mothers carrying infants were ruthlessly clubbed or beaten back with long bamboo poles,” wrote
The New York Times
correspondent Hallet Abend, who watched the pitiful scene. “At one bridge a railing collapsed under the crowd’s pressure and forty women and children fell shrieking into Siccawei Creek. Five or six were drowned.”
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The impending victory had whetted the Japanese Army’s thirst for blood. Chinese, whether in uniform or not, faced an uncertain future if they had the bad luck of running into an adrenaline-pumped band of enemy soldiers. An English architect experienced what that meant first-hand. He had been driving his car west of Shanghai on a necessary errand, helping a Japanese soldier start his truck on the way. Eventually, he had taken in a terrified Chinese family of seven desperate to escape the unsafe countryside and get to the International Settlement.

On the way back, his car was stopped by a Japanese roadblock. The soldiers opened the doors and tried to drag out the panic-stricken Chinese. When the car owner stepped out, brandishing his passport and hoping to talk his way out of the predicament, he was faced with a six-foot-tall Japanese who pointed a revolver at his heart. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a Japanese infantryman shoot an injured Chinese lying by the roadside. It looked like the end. However, at the last moment, the Japanese truck driver whom the Englishman had helped earlier turned up and argued his case. He was allowed to move on with the Chinese family.
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It was clear that left to the mercy of the Japanese armed forces, everyone in conquered Shanghai was in danger. The safety district envisaged by Jacquinot was needed, and it was needed urgently. By early November, the Japanese Consul General Okamoto had received a reply from Tokyo. It agreed to the plan. The local army and navy commanders also gave their consent after receiving reassurances that no Chinese military personnel
would enter the zone.
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Jacquinot reiterated that reassurance publicly. “It is purely and simply what it is called, a district of safety for the non-combatants,” he said.
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The district, known as the Jacquinot Zone, opened formally at 5:00 p.m. on November 9, 1937, on the northern edge of the Chinese city.
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It immediately became home to an estimated 100,000 refugees. Jacquinot saw it as a revolutionary step. “It might, with advantage, be copied elsewhere for instance in Europe,” he declared.
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Newspaper commentators were equally enthusiastic. “Even in the most difficult and delicate circumstances produced by the heat of battle, scope is still left for the observance of the laws of humanity and the sanctity of the pledged word,” the
North China Herald
wrote in an editorial.
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It did, in fact, become a model for the protection of civilians in other urban battles.
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For Jacquinot himself, the main legacy was the Shanghai zone, which remained in operation until 1940 and shielded large numbers of people from the arbitrary cruelty of the Japanese victors. “The Japanese have not gained entry here,” he told a visitor with a mixture of defiance and pride. “And the only flags that fly over this place are the French flag and the standard of the Red Cross.”
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November 11 was the 19th anniversary of the end of the Great War. For Shanghai’s expatriate community the day should have been an opportunity to reflect on the horrors of past wars and unite in the hope that they would never happen again. Instead, it was a reminder that armed conflict was still very much part of the human condition. The annual parade on the Bund took place as in previous years, but sandbags had to be removed at the foot of the War Memorial to make room for wreathes.
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The military orchestra’s solemn music was mixed with the sound of gunfire as south of the Settlement, Shanghai saw its last great urban battle. There, pockets of Chinese resistance held out, determined to make the conquest of the city as hard as possible for the Japanese.

Between five and six thousand Chinese soldiers were left in Nanshi after three days of fighting. From early on the morning of November 11, the Japanese moved in for the kill. Their artillery started a furious and indiscriminate artillery barrage against the densely populated urban area.
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American reporter Edgar Snow and other foreign correspondents were fol
lowing the battle from the relative safety of the French Concession, across Siccawei Creek. The Japanese tanks proceeded cautiously down narrow roads, rolling a few feet before unleashing their guns and then hastily backing up. The infantry also moved from cover to cover, mindful of Chinese snipers hiding in the buildings along the alleys and in the stilted huts erected on top of the city’s canals.

Most residents had fled the advancing Japanese, and the combat appeared to unfold in a ghost town. But there were a few almost surreal examples of civilians going on living their lives in the middle of whistling bullets and exploding grenades. In a sampan, a group of Chinese were eating rice as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Suddenly, a machine gun salvo cut across the boat, and the occupants speedily hid under the matting. Whether they were killed or not, Snow, who watched the scene, would never find out.

The Japanese were still facing the same terrain difficulty that had beset them for three months—waterways. As they moved through Nanshi, they were constantly slowed down by the need to set up pontoon bridges across canals in order to move from one block to the next.
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The French wanted no part of the fight and saw to it that the border with the Chinese district was clearly marked off as a non-combatant area. This was done by means of thousands of small Tricolors, leftovers from the July 14 Bastille Day, planted by police.
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