The Battle of Shanghai begins

On the morning of 13 August 1937 the first shots were exchanged in the northern districts of Shanghai between the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps and Japanese naval infantry. In the afternoon a regular battle broke out by the Bazi Bridge in the Zhabei district, and in the evening Japanese warships on the Huangpu River opened fire on Chinese positions. The next day the government in Nanjing issued a declaration of self-defence, the Chinese air force attacked Japanese warships, and Chiang Kai-shek threw his best divisions into the attack. The war that had been fought in northern China since the night at the Marco Polo Bridge moved to the country’s largest city, its financial and commercial centre, lying only three hundred kilometres from the capital. So began the Battle of Shanghai, the greatest battle of the first year of the Sino-Japanese War, in which nearly a million soldiers took part over three months.

A city in the eyes of the world

In the 1930s Shanghai was the fifth-largest city in the world and the most cosmopolitan city in Asia. Alongside the Chinese municipality it contained the International Settlement, run by a council dominated by the British, and the French Concession. British, American, French and Italian troops were stationed in the city, and the warships of many powers lay on the river. The Japanese, the largest group of foreigners, lived mainly in the Hongkou district, which the Settlement’s defence plan had assigned to the Japanese naval infantry.

Five years earlier war had already been fought in these same districts. The Shanghai incident of 1932 ended with a truce that barred the Chinese from keeping troops in a zone around the city while allowing the Japanese to maintain a garrison there. The Japanese naval infantry, the Special Naval Landing Forces, built a network of concrete fortifications in Hongkou and Yangshupu, with its headquarters in a reinforced-concrete building on North Sichuan Road and fortified cotton mills. The Chinese government, for its part, had for years been quietly preparing for the next round. Under the guidance of German advisers – first Hans von Seeckt and then General Alexander von Falkenhausen – several divisions were trained and armed on the German model, and lines of bunkers, which some called the Chinese Hindenburg Line, were built between Shanghai and Nanjing. Soldiers disguised as Peace Preservation Corps policemen were smuggled into the demilitarised zone.

From Marco Polo to Hongqiao

After the clash near Beijing on the night of 7–8 July 1937, the government of Fumimaro Konoe decided to send reinforcements to northern China, and at the end of July the Japanese occupied Beijing and Tianjin. Refugees poured into Shanghai, where all was still quiet, and Japanese residents from the interior evacuated to Hongkou. In Tokyo the military was divided. The chief of the Operations Section of the General Staff, Kanji Ishiwara, wanted to confine the war to the north and not to send divisions to the Yangtze. The navy, which regarded central China as its sphere, demanded decisive action in Shanghai.

The spark was an incident on 9 August. That afternoon Sub-Lieutenant Isao Ōyama, commander of one of the naval infantry detachments, and his driver, Seaman Yōzō Saitō, drove up to the gate of the Hongqiao military airfield on the western outskirts. Both were shot dead, and a Chinese sentry of the Peace Preservation Corps was also killed. The circumstances are still disputed. The Chinese side claimed that the Japanese had tried to force their way into the airfield and had opened fire first. Ōyama, however, was unarmed, and some historians, such as Peter Harmsen, believe that the shoot-out with the sentry was staged after the two Japanese had been killed. Nor is it known whether Ōyama was acting on anyone’s orders.

On 10 August the Japanese consul general demanded the withdrawal of the Peace Preservation Corps and the dismantling of the Chinese fortifications around the city. The consuls of the powers tried to mediate, pointing out that Shanghai should not become a battlefield. Japan responded by sending reinforcements: on 11 August warships of Vice-Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa’s Third Fleet appeared on the river, and about two thousand naval infantry went ashore. According to Japanese sources, the garrison then numbered at most about five thousand men; according to Chinese sources, which included the crews of the warships, well over ten thousand. That same day Chiang Kai-shek ordered General Zhang Zhizhong, commander of the defence of the Nanjing–Shanghai area, to move the 87th and 88th Divisions into the city. These were elite German-trained units, in German-style helmets and with German weapons. The Chinese plan envisaged a surprise attack that would push the Japanese into the river before their reinforcements arrived.

The first shots

Who opened fire first on 13 August depends on whose sources one reads. According to the Chinese press, at about 9.15 a.m. several dozen Japanese naval infantrymen came out of a school on North Sichuan Road and fired on Peace Preservation Corps posts on Baoshan Road, withdrawing after an exchange of fire lasting a quarter of an hour or so. According to Japanese accounts, the exchange of shots was an ordinary patrol incident, and the real battle began in the afternoon, when at about 4.54 p.m. a battalion of the Chinese 88th Division blew up the bridges over the canal by the Bazi Bridge and opened fire with mortars. Chinese sources say the reverse: that it was the Japanese who crossed the bridge and attacked. In the evening the ships of the Third Fleet began shelling the Chinese districts of Zhabei and Jiangwan. Late that night Chiang Kai-shek ordered Zhang Zhizhong to launch a general attack the next day.

The dispute over who started it also matters for how the whole battle is judged. Some historians, especially Japanese ones, stress that it was the Chinese who chose Shanghai as the battlefield and were the first to concentrate troops there. Others point out that Japan, already waging open war in the north, had itself demanded the unilateral withdrawal of Chinese forces from their own city. What is known is that Chiang chose to fight at Shanghai deliberately. He wanted to force the Japanese to fight in the Yangtze delta, where a network of canals and rice paddies hampered the movement of motorised columns, to gain time to evacuate industry to the interior, and to show the powers, whose interests in Shanghai were enormous, that China was fighting. Historians still disagree over whether this strategy was right.

Black Saturday

On 14 August the government in Nanjing issued a declaration of self-defence and resistance, in which it accused Japan of aggression and announced that China would defend itself. In the morning Chinese Northrop Gamma bombers attacked Japanese warships off Wusong, and during the day further aircraft tried to hit the flagship of the Third Fleet, the old armoured cruiser Izumo, anchored by the Japanese consulate right next to the Bund. Clouds lingered over the city after a typhoon that had passed over the coast a few days earlier, and the Chinese airmen had no experience of attacking ships. In the afternoon, at about 4.30 p.m., aircraft under fire from the Izumo’s anti-aircraft guns dropped bombs that missed the ship. Two fell on Nanjing Road by the Cathay and Palace hotels, in the very heart of the International Settlement. A quarter of an hour or so later two more exploded in front of the Great World amusement centre on the edge of the French Concession, where thousands of refugees from the northern districts had taken shelter.

Between several hundred and more than a thousand people were killed, and the total number of dead and wounded is estimated at about three thousand. They included Chinese and foreigners, passers-by, refugees and hotel guests. In Shanghai the day became known as Black Saturday or Bloody Saturday. It was a tragic mistake, not a deliberate attack, but it showed that the great city with its foreign enclaves was no longer a safe haven. That same day Chinese fighters of Captain Gao Zhihang’s 4th Group shot down several Japanese bombers over Hangzhou without loss to themselves. From 1940, 14 August was celebrated in China as Air Force Day.

The name “Bloody Saturday” also became attached to another day of this battle. On 28 August Japanese aircraft bombed the South Station, which was crowded with refugees. The photojournalist H. S. Wong then photographed a crying baby in the ruins of the station. The picture went round the world and was seen by more than a hundred million people. It became one of the best-known images of the war in China.

Tokyo responds

The Japanese government treated the Chinese attack on its warships as proof that there would no longer be a local settlement. On the night of 14–15 August Konoe’s cabinet held an emergency meeting, and on the morning of 15 August it announced that Japan must “chastise the Chinese army” and bring the government in Nanjing to its senses. That same day the Shanghai Expeditionary Army was formed, made up of the 3rd and 11th Divisions, and General Iwane Matsui, recalled to active service, an expert on China and an advocate of a hard line, was appointed its commander. Navy Mitsubishi G3M bombers, taking off from Taiwan and from the island of Kyūshū, began raids on Nanjing, Hangzhou and other cities, known in Japan as transoceanic bombing. Aircraft were attacking targets hundreds of kilometres from their bases, across the sea, something that a few years earlier had seemed impossible. Over the following days Chinese fighters shot down a dozen or so of these aircraft.

The assault on Hongkou

The Chinese attack, launched on the afternoon of 14 August, stalled on the very first day. The naval infantry bunkers withstood the shells of the Chinese 150 mm howitzers, the heaviest weapons the Chinese army had. The artillery stood too far back, communications failed, and every attack came under fire from the warships on the river. Soldiers of the 88th Division crept up to the strongpoints under covering machine-gun fire and destroyed them with grenades. The brigade commander Huang Meixing was killed by the Bazi Bridge. In the evening Chiang ordered the assault to be halted.

On 17 August the two divisions attacked again after a heavy artillery preparation, using German storm-troop tactics. The Chinese took street after street and surrounded Japanese strongpoints with sandbag barriers. They captured some of them, but there was no breakthrough. The newly arrived 36th Division, also German-trained, was thrown into the fighting, together with British-built light tanks that had no experience of cooperating with infantry. On 21 and 22 August Chinese units broke through in Yangshupu to the Huangpu waterfront, but they could not take the quay walls and the fortified cotton mills. Meanwhile the Japanese were receiving further reinforcements from Japan and Manchuria.

The battle was fought a few hundred metres from the International Settlement, whose residents watched it from hotel roofs and the waterfront. The American journalist Edgar Snow wrote that it was as if the Battle of Verdun were being fought on the Seine, before the eyes of a neutral Paris on the Right Bank. On 26 August Japanese aircraft strafed the car of the British ambassador, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, on the road from Nanjing, seriously wounding him, which provoked a sharp protest from London.

On 23 August Matsui’s Expeditionary Army landed on the Yangtze, several dozen kilometres north of the city, at Wusong and in the area of Chuanshakou and Shizilin. This ended the first phase of the battle. The Chinese offensive, whose aim had been to destroy the Japanese garrison before reinforcements arrived, had failed, and at enormous cost. The street battle turned into a long, gruelling struggle on the approaches to the city.

From incident to war

The fighting in Shanghai ensured that the clash near Beijing grew into a war engulfing the whole of China. On 21 August China signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in Nanjing, and the USSR soon began supplying it with aircraft, weapons and volunteers. In the second half of August the Communist Red Army was formally incorporated into the government army as the Eighth Route Army, a step towards the renewal of the united front that had been in preparation since the Xi’an incident. On 2 September the Japanese government changed the name of the conflict from the “North China Incident” to the “China Incident” (Shina jihen), acknowledging that it covered the whole country. Neither side, however, declared war: Japan to avoid the consequences of the American Neutrality Acts, and China so as not to lose supplies from abroad.

For Japan the battle was the first sign that its generals’ calculations had failed. They had reckoned that Shanghai would fall within days and that China would be forced to make concessions within months. Instead Japan had to send division after division to the Yangtze delta. For China, Shanghai became a symbol of resistance, but also the source of a loss from which Chiang Kai-shek’s army never recovered, for most of the soldiers and officers of the elite divisions died in the fighting. On the road to the Second World War, the Battle of Shanghai meant that a great war was already being fought in Asia between two states that had mobilised millions of men. Many historians see the beginning of the Second World War here, in July and August 1937, rather than in September 1939. The bombing of cities, the deaths of thousands of civilians and street fighting before the eyes of the whole world foreshadowed what was to befall Warsaw, Rotterdam and Stalingrad in the years that followed.