Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (10 page)

Chennault had suggested bombing the ships in the Huangpu River because of the support their artillery provided to the Japanese infantry. Since there was no Chinese officer with the expertise to prepare an operation like this, the First Lady had asked Chennault to take over. Chennault was completely unprepared for this new role, but already feeling a certain sense of affinity with China and goaded by excitement at the prospect of
trying his hands at a real air war, he had agreed. He had stayed up until 4:00 a.m. with his old friend Billy McDonald looking at maps and planning the day’s missions. “Unknowingly, we were setting the stage for Shanghai famous Black Saturday,” Chennault wrote with remarkable frankness in his memoirs.
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After taking off the following morning, Chennault had run into low clouds and had evaded rainstorms down the Yangtze valley in the direction of Shanghai. As he approached the city, he got a first inkling that the attacks had not gone according to plan. He spotted six Chinese planes, and far below them, a warship with guns blazing. The aircraft had just dive-bombed the vessel, apparently without success. Chennault made a run past the ship and discovered to his chagrin that it had a huge Union Jack painted on the affterdeck. It was the British cruiser
Cumberland.
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After he returned to base, Chennault was informed about the tragedy that had taken place that day. Much later, in his memoirs, he was able to tell the world his version of how and why the attack went so horribly wrong. The Chinese crews had been trained to bomb at a fixed speed from an altitude of 7,500 feet. Since it had been overcast that day, the pilots had decided to dive below the clouds and bomb from 1,500 feet instead. They not only failed to adjust their bomb sights to the new speed and altitude, but also ignored strict orders to steer clear of the International Settlement. Ultimately, therefore, hundreds were dead due to human error.
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In the days after the tragedy, there were also other explanations as to why Chinese pilots had ended up killing so many of their own compatriots. According to Chinese press reports, the pilot of the plane over the French Concession had tried to release his bombs over a race course nearby, but they fell short by about 300 yards.
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An air force captain interviewed in his hospital bed by the
Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury
claimed that he had been the pilot of the plane, and offered yet another version. He explained that he had been on the way back to his base in his twin-seat aircraft from a raid against the Naval Landing Force headquarters when he was attacked from above by a Japanese fighter who killed his observer and wounded him. Somehow, the bullets from the Japanese plane damaged the bomb racks, causing the disaster to take place, he said.
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Eleanor B. Roosevelt, the wife of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was in Shanghai at the time of the bombing and was horrified by the loss
of innocent life. She sent a letter to Japan’s premier, Prince Konoye, urging him to seek ways to minimize the risk of Chinese air raids, which she argued was caused by the presence of Japan’s military in the Shanghai area. The Japanese did not reply. However, the day after, the
Izumo
was removed from its anchorage near the Japanese Consulate to the middle of the Huangpu River. The cruiser was close enough to still be able to contribute its artillery to the fight inland, but far enough away to significantly reduce the danger to civilians in the city.
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What no one knew at the time was that the twin tragedies could very well have been prevented—by Japan. The Japanese had broken the Chinese Air Force codes, which consistently kept them one step ahead. On August 13, the Third Fleet had intercepted a Chinese telegram revealing the plan to attack the vessels anchored in the Huangpu. As a result of this intelligence, the Japanese had prepared a preventive air raid to be carried out by naval aircraft on the morning of August 14.
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Bad weather intervened. One ship-based air unit arrived too late to its designated point, while another warned that high waves had made takeoff and landing nearly impossible. The Japanese commanders had reluctantly canceled the day’s operation, with severe consequences for the people of Shanghai.
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The day after “Black Saturday,” August 15, the weather remained poor, but the air war continued, with a more intense Japanese effort. Sergeant Hosokawa Hajime was on one of 20 Mitsubishi G3M medium bombers that took off from Omura Air Base on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. Their targets were air bases near Nanjing. It was a risky undertaking. On their way to the Chinese capital, they were attacked by Chinese Curtiss Hawk fighters and on their return flight, after they had bombed their targets, they were pursued once more. This time, the more maneuverable Chinese aircraft went in for the kill.

Sergeant Hosokawa observed how a plane in the formation took a hit to one of its wing tanks and soon was engulfed in flames. The seven-member crew squeezed into the front cabin, and the pilot thrust open the top hatch to provide relief from the heat of the blaze that was consuming the aircraft. As the flames approached, the airmen were stretching their torsos out of the narrow opening, but could not jump as they had no para
chutes—a matter of honor. All they could do was to wait for the inevitable. Suddenly, the plane turned into a fireball and plunged to the ground. Shortly afterwards, another plane in the formation was hit, and again the crew rushed to the front cabin, opening the top hatch with no hope of actually escaping. Hosokawa watched the pilot in the second plane hug his crew members before it dropped out of the formation and shot to the ground like a fiery comet. By the time the battered formation landed on the Japanese-controlled Korean island of Cheju, it had lost four aircraft.
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The G3Ms were part of the newly formed First Combined Air Group,
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which had been placed under the command of Hasegawa Kiyo-shi’s Third Fleet. As the hostilities in Shanghai broke out, the 54-year-old vice admiral had displayed little hesitation when it came to deploying his planes far beyond Shanghai, even though this entailed expanding the war beyond a few localized incidents. On the same day that Sgt Hosokawa’s formation was battered by Chinese fighters, a total of 14 other G3M bombers took off from their airfield in the north of Taiwan, which like Korea was a Japanese colony. Having targeted air facilities in the Chinese city of Nanchang, all planes returned.
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Hasegawa was able to order these raids as his nominal political masters in Tokyo provided little guidance and overall showed limited interest in being involved in events at the front.

It was a surreal situation. Even after thousands had been killed in battle, the fighting in China remained an undeclared war as far as the Japanese government was concerned, and it committed forces only in a piecemeal fashion. The Japanese Cabinet kept referring to events in Shanghai and further north near Beijing as “the China Incident.”
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However, euphemisms were not enough to disguise the fact that Shanghai was becoming a problem. In the early hours of August 15, a Japanese Cabinet meeting decided to send army reinforcements to the hard-pressed marines in Shanghai, and the 3rd and 11th Divisions were deployed.

The two divisions were to form the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, a unit resurrected from the 1932 hostilities. Many of the soldiers who were to be sent off to war were reservists in their late 20s and early 30s who had long since returned to civilian life from military service and were poorly disciplined.
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In their habitual disdain for the Chinese, the Japanese leaders figured that this would be more than enough to deal with the nuisance
across the sea. Underestimating the foe was a mistake they were to repeat again and again in the coming weeks and months.

To head the force, the Japanese leaders fetched out of retirement 59-year-old General Matsui Iwane, a veteran of the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. Matsui, a wisp of a man weighing no more than 100 pounds with a large 19th-century moustache and a palsy affecting his right face and right arm, was not an accidental choice. He knew China well and had been an acquaintance of Sun Yat-sen’s, the revolutionary who had been the driving force in establishing the Republic of China in 1912 after the fall of the empire. Intellectually, Matsui ranged well beyond mere military matters, and it was well known among Japanese officials that he had indulged a “political hobby” after leaving the army, promoting his special idea of Asian unity and how to bring it about.
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Matsui mixed strident Japanese nationalism with a pan-Asian outlook, thus embodying much of the contradiction that characterized imperial Japan and its views about its role in Asia. In 1935, he had helped establish Dai Ajia Kyokai, or Greater Asia Society, an organization working to overcome divisions among the peoples of the continent and strengthen them to better resist western imperialism. He had toured China in the mid-1930s and had met Chiang Kai-shek repeatedly. If the encounters had established any rapport, that had soon disappeared. By the summer of 1937, Chiang was not Matsui’s favorite Chinese at all. A staunch anti-communist, the Japanese general had been gravely dismayed by Chiang’s decision to make peace with his Red rivals in order to coordinate and concentrate their efforts in a bid to defeat the Japanese threat.
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Matsui channeled his disaffection with Chiang into an extremely proactive approach to the command of troops in the field. He exhibited an aggressive bent from the moment he got his assignment, before he had even set foot in Shanghai. The city must be taken, he believed, but it was not the ultimate prize. That was the Chinese capital Nanjing. After being named commander of the expeditionary force, he explained to Army Minister Sugiyama Hajime that there was no choice but to break Chiang Kai-shek by taking the Chinese seat of government. “That is what I must do,” he said.
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Shortly afterwards, Matsui told his chief of staff Major General Iinuma Mamoru that Japan ought to declare war on China.
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The central government in Tokyo had little clear idea about its ultimate
goals in Shanghai, leaving local commanders free to set the agenda. By default, they were placed in a situation where they could wield disproportionate power. The problem was that they liked the power too much and did not shy away from using it. Vice Admiral Hasegawa had demonstrated this by launching air attacks on a wide range of targets along the Chinese east coast immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. Matsui was of the same mold. In the existing circumstances, this made them dangerous men.

Asia’s Stalingrad: Japanese infantrymen cautiously advance down an alley left completely in ruins. By early October 1937, when this photo was taken, this part of Shanghai, the working class neighborhood of Zhabei, had been a battleground for nearly two months.
Courtesy Asahi Shimbun

Japanese infantry man a barricade in downtown Shanghai, early in the battle. In 1937, Shanghai was China’s most cosmopolitan and westernized city.
Author’s collection