Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (20 page)

China hoped that the conclusion of the pact was only a beginning, and that it might have “far-reaching and beneficial possibilities,” according to the Chinese ambassador to Moscow, Jiang Tingfu, a level-headed diplomat normally known to hold pessimistic views about the likelihood of Soviet aid.
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Chiang Kai-shek had initially been suspicious of Soviet intentions, writing in his diary on August I, when diplomats on the two sides were preparing the treaty, that he feared the Kremlin would use the agreement to pressurize Japan into a similar treaty with Moscow.
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However, once the treaty was signed, skepticism gave way to optimism. Three days after the announcement of the treaty, Chiang predicted in a bullish speech that the Soviet Union would eventually enter the war against Japan.
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China had entertained hopes of Soviet help in case of war with Japan since at least late 1936,
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and in the months leading up to the actual outbreak of hostilities in the summer of 1937, the Soviet ambassador to China, Dmitry Bogomolov, had done everything in his power to keep those hopes alive. “If [China] would undertake to offer armed resistance to Japan,” Bogomolov was paraphrased as saying, “it could confidently expect the armed support of the Soviet Union.”
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The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin
had a straightforward reason to want to spur China into a full-blown war with Japan. It would keep Russia’s back free while he concentrated on the strategic challenges in a Europe dominated by Hitler. A war with China might bleed the Japanese foe dry, so he would not have to worry about a threat from Asia even in the long term. Exasperated British diplomats tried at least once to alert Chiang Kai-shek to the Soviet ruse, with a warning that the Russians “only have their own interests in mind,”
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but this did not seriously shake the Chinese leader’s belief in Soviet willingness to help.

At a deep cognitive level, there was a reason why Chiang Kai-shek and others around him wanted to believe that not just Soviet aid, but also direct Soviet participation in the hostilities was imminent. This was how they expected a war with Japan to pan out. The Chinese General Staff’s War Plan A, drafted in 1937, was based on the premise that a conflict with Japan would soon set off a larger conflict between Japan and either the Soviet Union or the United States. Therefore, the key aim for China was to hold out against the superior Japanese until it could be relieved by the arrival of a much more powerful ally, whether Russian or American.
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This plan was not as naive as it might seem, but was based on the calculation that neither Moscow nor Washington would want to see Japanese power grow too strong on the Asian mainland.

Some of Chiang’s commanders believed that it was partly in order to hasten outside intervention that the Chinese leader decided to make Shanghai a battlefield. It was true that Shanghai offered tactical advantages that the north Chinese plain did not, an argument that had been decisive in getting Chiang’s own generals to accept opening a new front there. However, these advantages would seem to be a small reward considering the risk involved in luring the enemy to occupy China’s most prosperous region. Much more crucially perhaps, Shanghai was an international city and a key asset for the world’s most powerful economies, who would not allow it to become Japanese territory, or so he believed.
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According to Li Zongren, one of China’s top generals, Chiang expanded the war to Shanghai because the importance of the city might lead to “mediation on the part of the European powers and the United States or even to their armed intervention.”
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Despite their success in taking Luodian and Yinhang, the Japanese units still faced an uphill struggle. Their hold on the Shanghai region remained extremely tenuous, and was based on control of two isolated pockets north of Shanghai as well as a beleaguered garrison inside the city. Given their numerical inferiority, they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese. The landings at Wusong and Chuanshakou had initially boosted the manpower available in the Shanghai area by fewer than 8,000 troops, and even though reinforcements were gradually arriving, the pace was slow. Matsui Iwane felt a more radical increase in troop levels was needed to bring about a decisive outcome.

At the end of August, he sent a cable to Tokyo arguing that in order to finish the job he would need a total of five divisions. At a minimum, he requested the dispatch of one more division from the homeland along with the release of the 11th Division’s Amaya Detachment, the regiment-sized outfit posted in northeast China, so it could be reunited with the division at Chuanshakou. The Japanese imperial staff and navy command responded mostly favorably, agreeing to the redirection of the detachment to Shanghai along with several units of the elite marines.
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While he was waiting for reinforcements, Matsui had to solve his problems on the battleground with the resources he had. One week after the landing, the Wusong fort remained a severe problem for the 3rd “Lucky” Japanese Division and the navy, which was charged with supplying the division. The Chinese artillery made anchoring near the landing zone a risky undertaking, and several naval officers who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time were blown to pieces. On occasion, the shelling had been so severe that the vessels had to interrupt their work and withdraw to a berth in the middle of the Huangpu, with only part of the supplies unloaded. The 3rd Division had been disappointingly slow in coming up with a plan for taking out the fort, and it seemed not to have enough manpower to carry out the operation on its own.
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Instead, Matsui’s staff settled on an alternative plan that also let the 11th Division play a role. While the 3rd Division would launch a frontal attack against Wusong, the 11th was to move the Asama Detachment,
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a regiment-sized unit, southeast along the Yangtze bank and attack Wusong from the other side. On the way, it was to take the fortress at Shizilin, a town on the Yangtze River. Officers on Matsui’s staff suggested simply
handing over the entire task of taking Wusong to the 11th Division, which seemed overall to be a more efficient fighting force, but the general turned down the idea. Even if it made sense militarily, it would deal too much of a blow to the reputation of the venerable 3rd Division. The 11th Division was to remain in a support role, dispatching only one regiment.
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The attack began at 10:00 a.m. on August 31. After intensive naval and air bombardment involving 30 planes, a regiment of the 3rd Division embarked on landing craft, sailed down the Huangpu and made a landing on the riverbank north of Wusong.
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All through the afternoon until dark, the soldiers fought scattered Chinese units in front of Wusong, in preparation for final entry into the city. At the same time, the 11th Division’s Asama Detachment kicked off its part of the offensive, marching down the bank of the Yangtze towards Shizilin.
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The Japanese tightened the noose from the morning of the following day, September 1. The 3rd Division’s regiment took possession of a hamlet west of Wusong and prepared a push against the town. The Chinese forces defending it put up strong resistance, and it was late in the afternoon before the Japanese were able to make any advance, aided by ship artillery.
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The attack was costly. Among those killed on the Japanese side was Major Shimosaka Masao, who was held to be one of his country’s foremost experts on amphibious warfare.
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The Asama Detachment had somewhat more success on that day, managing to take the fort at Shizilin in the afternoon.
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The Japanese launched their final push against Wusong at dawn on September 2. The fort fell with surprising ease. Transport ships that had been berthed in the Huangpu River, waiting for the guns of Wusong to be wiped out, could now anchor just below the fort. By 10:00 a.m., Matsui spotted the banner of the Rising Sun hoisted over Wusong. “I felt boundless gratification,” he wrote in his diary.
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Half the Chinese regiment holding Wusong had become casualties.
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This was a significant loss, not just in manpower but also strategically, and the search for a scapegoat soon began. It was found in the form of the 9th Army Group’s 61st Infantry Division, which had been assigned to the defense of Wusong, but was said not to be sufficiently prepared for the attack. Chiang Kai-shek dismissed the commander of the division for this mistake.
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With the fall of Wusong, the town of Baoshan had become the last major obstacle to continuous Japanese control of the entire riverbank all
the way from Chuanshakou to the outskirts of Shanghai. The town’s fort was also a major threat to Japanese naval activity, due to its location near the confluence of the Yangtze and the Huangpu. Chiang Kai-shek perfectly understood the value of Baoshan, and he ordered the unit manning the defenses—a battalion of the 98th Infantry Division commanded by 28-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Yao Ziqing—to hold the town at any price. Baoshan had one significant advantage. Like many Chinese towns of a certain age, it was surrounded by a thick ancient city wall that in imperial times had helped defend against invaders and still served that purpose well.

The Japanese also understood that Baoshan favored defense, and that even a small unit might be able to hold out for a prolonged period of time. To avoid what was likely to be considerable bloodshed, the 3rd Division, which had been given the responsibility of taking the town, initially attempted to get the Chinese to abandon it without a fight by dropping leaflets from airplanes seeking to persuade them to surrender. Matsui considered this an exercise in futility that only added to his frustration with what he saw as the 3rd Division’s timid command. The stoicism that he had initially admired in the division’s commander had turned out to be more akin to lethargy.
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September 4 saw no change in the 3rd Division’s slow-moving approach towards Baoshan. When the division suggested around mid-afternoon that a planned direct assault on the town should be postponed until the following day, Matsui lost his temper and insisted that the attack be carried out immediately. He also temporarily put an artillery unit that had just disembarked at the division’s disposal, so that its guns could assist by punching holes in the thick city wall. Despite this support, Japanese soldiers sent in waves to scale the wall sustained significant losses and were not able to penetrate the defenses by nightfall.
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At noon on September 5, Japanese bombers raided Baoshan while naval artillery rained shells indiscriminately over its gray roofs. The land attack began an hour later when Japanese tanks pushed towards the town gates. This time they succeeded in getting through. Chinese commander Yao Ziqing sent two messages to the 98th Infantry Division. One was a request for reinforcements—impossible because Japanese airplanes strafed and bombed any Chinese units attempting to approach—and the other was a pledge to fight to the death. The young lieutenant colonel, whose round
glasses gave him the air of an effeminate intellectual, proved to be fully up to the task, which was, essentially, to kill as many Japanese as possible before the inevitable annihilation of his entire battalion, himself included.

The Japanese pushed the Chinese defenders into a shrinking perimeter. By sunset, Yao Ziqing had only 100 soldiers left. The night passed without incident, because the Japanese did not want to fight without support from the air, but they all knew that dawn would bring the end. The sun had just risen over the horizon when the attack resumed. By the time the city was about to fall, Yao Ziqing ordered a soldier to escape to the outside to pass a report on the situation in the town to his superiors. Unseen by the Japanese, the soldier managed to scale a wall and run into the surrounding countryside. He was the only soldier to survive the battle. With him he brought a message from the battalion: “We are determined to stay at our posts and to continue fighting the enemy until each and every one of us is killed.”
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The fall of Baoshan enabled the 3rd Division to finally move westwards and link up with the 11th Division.
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This success came at the same time as other good news for the Japanese. On September 6, the Tida Detachment, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, made a landing at the Japanese Golf Club, now renamed Gongda airfield, and secured its use. Then the Second Combined Air Group moved in.
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It was an important addition to the air base on Chongming, the large island in the Yangtze estuary, that had been in use since early September,
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as in time, it would help further reinforce Japanese air superiority in the Shanghai area and improve the conditions for close tactical support of the ground units.
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Also, and even more importantly, Tokyo decided in favor of a major increase in available manpower in the Shanghai area. On September 7, it ordered the dispatch to the city of the 9th, 13th, and 101st Infantry Divisions as well as the Shigeto Detachment, which consisting of units based in the Japanese colony of Taiwan.
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The same day, 10 Japanese infantry battalions were ordered to move from the northeast of China to the Shanghai area.
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The situation looked bleak to the Chinese. Not only were the Chinese frontline units losing the battle, but they were suffering extraordinarily heavy losses in the process. Yao Ziqing’s 98th Infantry Division had casualties reaching 4,960 by early September. These included one regimental commander killed and another wounded. Various units of the division received reinforcements up to four times during the entire battle for Shang
hai. At the moment the reinforcements arrived, they would be given a weapon and sent straight to the frontline. “Some were injured immediately upon arrival,” said Fang Jing, one of the division’s two brigade commanders. “When they got to the hospital, they would have no idea about which unit they belonged to.”
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