The end of the Battle of Shanghai

On 26 November 1937 the Chinese command ordered its troops to abandon the line of bunkers between Wuxi and Jiangyin, the last prepared defensive position between Shanghai and Nanjing. Some Chinese accounts take this order as the end of the Battle of Shanghai, which had begun on 13 August. Popular chronologies record that on this day the battle ended in a Japanese victory as Chinese troops evacuated the city. The Chinese had in fact left Shanghai itself earlier: the general retreat began on 9 November, the last units in the Nanshi district stopped fighting on 11 November, and Chinese sources regard 12 November as the day the city fell. The date of 26 November marks the end of the rearguard fighting on the approaches to Nanjing, which passed without a break into the march on the capital.

Three months of battle

The battle began with a Chinese assault on the fortified Japanese naval infantry districts of Hongkou and Yangshupu. Chiang Kai-shek’s best divisions, trained by German advisers, reached the bank of the Huangpu River but could not push the Japanese into the water. From 23 August General Iwane Matsui’s Shanghai Expeditionary Army landed on the Yangtze north of the city, and September and October brought bloody fighting in the delta – for Luodian, dubbed the “meat grinder”, and for Dachang. Japanese superiority in artillery, aircraft and naval gunfire clashed with the tenacity of Chinese soldiers who often fought to the last man. On 26 October the Japanese took Dachang, and Chinese troops had to abandon Zhabei and the northern part of the city, which they had held for 75 days.

The Eight Hundred Heroes

The withdrawal from Zhabei was covered by a single battalion of the 88th Division. Some four hundred soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel Xie Jinyuan occupied the concrete Sihang (Four Banks) Warehouse on Suzhou Creek, directly opposite the International Settlement. For four days, from 27 to 31 October, they beat off attacks in full view of thousands of spectators on the other bank. A Girl Guide, Yang Huimin, swam across the creek with a Chinese flag, which the defenders hoisted on the roof. The press wrote of the “Eight Hundred Heroes”, because the commanders gave the battalion’s original strength to mislead the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek wanted the Chinese flag to be flying in Shanghai when the conference of the signatories of the Nine-Power Treaty met in Brussels. On the night of 31 October to 1 November the defenders, on his orders, crossed into the Settlement, where the British interned them. Militarily it was an episode, but in China it became a legend that textbooks and films still tell today.

The landing in Hangzhou Bay

Chiang Kai-shek wanted to continue the defence on the south bank of Suzhou Creek, although some generals, such as Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, advised pulling the decimated divisions back to the prepared bunker lines. On 30 October the Japanese forced the creek. The decisive blow, however, came from another direction. On 5 November the Japanese 10th Army under General Heisuke Yanagawa, made up of divisions brought from northern China and from Japan, landed at Jinshanwei on the north shore of Hangzhou Bay, some 60 kilometres south of Shanghai. The coast there was defended by a very weak detachment, because the divisions intended to hold it had earlier been moved to Dachang. The next day Japanese balloons appeared over Shanghai bearing the message that a million soldiers had landed in Hangzhou Bay. The Japanese marched north to cut off the Chinese army’s line of retreat.

On 7 November Tokyo combined the two armies into the Central China Area Army under Matsui’s command. The Chinese command hesitated until 8 November, hoping for decisions by the powers in Brussels. Only then did it issue the order for a general retreat.

The retreat

The retreat, which began on 9 November, turned in many places into flight. Japanese aircraft bombed the columns and the bridges over the canals, and units crowded at the crossings. At Songjiang the 67th Army, which was to cover the retreat for three days, was routed and its commander, General Wu Keren, was killed. The Japanese unit that took Songjiang reported more than five thousand prisoners. Their subsequent fate is unknown, and the Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata believes that many of them may have been killed. In Nanshi, the Chinese district in the south of the city, police and remnants of the army held out until 11 November and then crossed into the French Concession. Thanks to the French Jesuit Robert Jacquinot de Besange, a safety zone recognised by both sides had been operating in Nanshi since 9 November, and hundreds of thousands of civilians took refuge there.

The beaten divisions fell back westwards to the line of bunkers between Suzhou and Fushan, built over several years with the help of German advisers. It proved useless. Units lost contact, had no maps of the fortifications, and the officials who were supposed to open the shelters had fled, taking the keys with them. On 13 November the Japanese 16th Division landed on the Yangtze at Baimaokou, in the rear of this line. On 19 November the line was abandoned and the Japanese took Suzhou. The next and last line, between Wuxi and Jiangyin, did not hold out even for a week. On 26 November the Chinese command ordered it to be abandoned, and the troops fell back towards Nanjing.

The toll

According to official figures from November, the Battle of Shanghai cost the Chinese army more than 187,000 killed and wounded, and according to historians’ estimates some 250,000–300,000 men. The Japanese officially admitted to more than 9,000 killed and more than 31,000 wounded in the army, but historians consider these figures understated. Chiang Kai-shek lost most of his German-trained divisions and thousands of young officers. Zhabei and the other Chinese districts of Shanghai lay in ruins. The International Settlement and the French Concession, which the Japanese did not occupy for the time being, became a “Solitary Island” surrounded by occupied territory.

Chiang’s hopes of outside help came to nothing. The Brussels Conference, which had been sitting since 3 November, ended on 24 November, two days before the end of the battle, with declarations and no sanctions whatsoever against Japan. The United States, despite President Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech, did not want to get involved. Japan, which that same month had admitted Italy, together with Germany, to the Anti-Comintern Pact, had no intention of listening to anyone. The German ambassador to China, Oskar Trautmann, did pass on to Chiang at the beginning of November Japanese peace terms drawn up by the Foreign Minister, Kōki Hirota, but Chiang, counting on Brussels, rejected them, and after each new victory Japan only made them harsher. On 20 November the Chinese government announced the transfer of the capital to Chongqing in the interior, and in Tokyo an Imperial General Headquarters was set up to direct the war.

The road to Nanjing

The plan of the Japanese General Staff was to halt the troops on the Suzhou–Jiaxing line. Matsui and his division commanders, however, wanted to go further, to Nanjing, and set off without waiting for approval. Tokyo endorsed the fait accompli on 1 December, ordering the capture of the Chinese capital. Japanese soldiers, exhausted by three months of fighting, embittered by their losses and without supplies, plundered villages along the way and murdered their inhabitants. It was an ominous prelude to what happened in Nanjing in mid-December.

The end of the Battle of Shanghai closed the period in which China fought Japan in the open field with its best forces. From then on the war became a war of attrition, in which China gave up ground, moved its government and industry into the interior and waited for Japan to become bogged down. Japan won the battle but not the war: instead of a quick peace it faced eight years of fighting that tied down most of its army, drained its economy and pushed it towards confrontation with the West. On the road to the Second World War, the fall of Shanghai meant that in Asia there could no longer be any talk of a local incident. A great war was under way, and the powers that had failed to stop it in Brussels were themselves drawn into it four years later.