Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (31 page)

The Chinese commanders hurled a large number of their available troops into the Chenjiahang sector to prevent a collapse. These troops included units newly arrived from the Chinese provinces. In the early part of October, they deployed two divisions from the southwestern province of Sichuan. These divisions did not command much respect among the German advisors who deemed that insufficient training and equipment rendered them incapable of carrying out divisional-level operations in the field and concluded that they were best deployed in a regimental fashion to relieve burnt-out troops.
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The Sichuan troops were pulled out again when in the middle of the month four fresh divisions arrived from Guangxi, a province in southern China. The Chinese field commanders were eager to use the new troops, easily recognizable in their light brown uniforms and their British-style “tin hat” helmets, and they sent one of the four, the 173rd Guangxi Division, straight to Chenjiahang. Ordered to march on the evening of October 15, the division arrived before dawn the following day, to take over positions held by another division that had suffered severe attrition and needed to withdraw to the rear.
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While the handover of the positions was still taking place, the Japanese, who had detected the movement along the Chinese front, launched an intense air and artillery attack, causing serious casualties in the 173rd Division’s ranks before it had even properly deployed. Later the same day, when one of the division’s regiments was sent to engage the Japanese, it was slaughtered on the spot. By nightfall, two thirds of its soldiers had become casualties. The battle went on for the next four days, and gradually the three other Guangxi divisions also moved to the front. There was no breakthrough on either side, only desperate fighting over the same few inches of soil. “I had heard the expression ‘storm of steel’ before, but never really understood what it meant,” said a Guangxi officer. “Now I do.”
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By mid-October, Matsui’s initial optimism about his push south had shifted to weariness. The rain had already lasted for more than a week and had become a particular concern. It slowed down operations at all levels. The supplies took longer to reach the front, and the troops were unable to advance fast enough, if they were able to advance at all. He had received unconfirmed intelligence that senior Chinese commanders had moved from Suzhou to Nanxiang or even Shanghai proper. He had no idea if the reports were true, but they gave him food for thought. If the Chinese commanders were moving closer to the front, it meant that they were not about to abandon Shanghai. “It’s obvious that earlier views that the Chinese front was shaken had been premature,” he wrote in his diary. “Now is definitely not the time to rashly push the offensive.”
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The poor weather caused Matsui to repeatedly postpone a major shock attack to punch a hole through the Chinese defenses, which had been
planned for some time. However, the rain also had its benefits. The pause in the fighting was a relief for exhausted soldiers on both sides. The Chinese got rest, but so did the Japanese, and in addition the Japanese were given precious time to gradually dig their way closer to the Chinese lines. The next time they charged across no-man’s-land, the stretch of open field where they would be exposed to murderous Chinese fire would be a little shorter. The Japanese artillery had also finally reached the front in significant numbers, after being delayed for days on roads transformed into mud pools by the pouring rain. Nevertheless, the batteries were still using their shells sparingly, saving their ammunition for later. Their plan was to pulverize the Chinese strongholds one after the other, once the time had come.
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It was getting colder, and a parcel of warm clothes that Matsui had arranged to be sent to him from Tokyo the month before still had not reached him. At least winter uniforms had arrived for the 3rd and 11th Divisions. They needed all the encouragement they could get. The soldiers in the frontline had seen heavy attrition in recent weeks, and reinforcements had not been able to fully make up for that. The 3rd Division, for example, had taken more than 6,000 casualties, many of whom were from the division’s backbone of experienced officers and NCOs. Therefore, even though the division had received 6,500 new men as replacements, and thus on paper looked like it had been more than replenished, this was not really the case. Matsui estimated that its combat strength had decreased to about one sixth of the original level.
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Adversity was unavoidable in battle, and Matsui had great affection for the common soldiers who tried to keep a cheerful attitude despite all their trials. This made the unnecessary hardships caused by incompetence at the senior levels difficult for him to stomach. Matsui was dissatisfied with the work the officers had done before the advance south. Supply was a huge problem, mainly because they had not taken into account the possibilities for transportation by boat offered by the extensive creek and canal system. This was how the Chinese had moved goods around for centuries, if not millennia. The Japanese could do the same. In fact they had been doing the same since September further north bringing supplies from the Yangtze River to the troops fighting near Luodian. A little extra forethought, Matsui thought, and a significant amount of trouble could have been avoided.
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On October 19, Matsui received the first reports that soldiers from
Guangxi had arrived in the Shanghai area and were deployed around Wusong Creek. Despite all the reinforcements that he himself had received in recent weeks, there was no denying that Matsui faced a formidable foe, capable of pouring new troops into this theater more or less indefinitely. Deception was necessary to make up for the imbalance. To relieve pressure on the front, the Japanese Navy sent a mock invasion force up the Yangtze on a major three-day diversionary mission. The fleet, consisting of eight destroyers and more than 20 transport vessels carrying smaller landing craft, anchored ten miles upriver from Chuanshakou. They then subjected the surrounding area to intensive bombardment as if in preparation for a landing. There had been other maneuvers like this, but this was the first to also entail actual live fire against targets inland. “It’s sure to have a visible effect,” Matsui wrote in his diary.
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Politics was never far below the surface during the battle of Shanghai. Much of what happened in and around the city was really meant for an international audience. The intelligence about the Guangxi troops arrived at Matsui’s headquarters along with other information suggesting that the Chinese were strengthening their defenses further south. This indicated they were preparing to keep fighting for Shanghai even if the lines at Wusong Creek were breached. It followed a military logic, but diplomatic motives probably weighed just as heavily. An international conference on the war was approaching, scheduled to take place in Brussels. Chiang Kai-shek needed to keep his presence in the only Chinese city most foreigners were likely to have ever heard about.
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The battle for world public opinion was waged on several fronts. One topic bound to have a particular impact was poisonous gas. Less than two decades after the end of the Great War, it stood as the ultimate horror of modern warfare. Anyone caught using it would immediately be typecast in the role of the villain in the newspapers’ narratives. On October 14, China filed a complaint at the League of Nations accusing Japan of using gas on the Shanghai front. It said a total of 45 Chinese soldiers had fallen victim in two separate attacks that same month.
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Whether the Japanese actually did use gas in the Shanghai area was a matter of debate, and remained so in the years after the battle. Zhang Fakui, the Chinese commander in Pudong, was not aware of any instances of Japanese deployment of the weapon.
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In some cases, the extreme aware
ness of the risks posed by gas warfare caused soldiers to suspect gas attacks even when something much less sinister was actually taking place. During an attack against Japanese positions south of Wusong Creek, Chinese soldiers mistook a Japanese smoke grenade for a shell containing poison gas.
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It is also possible that the Japanese used non-lethal gas to temporarily incapacitate their enemies leaving them vulnerable to attack. Not that it really mattered if the gas was of the lethal sort or not, since the end result would be the same: death to the Chinese.
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According to the Japanese, the Chinese also resorted to gas on several occasions during the course of the battle for Shanghai. One of the times they accused them of utilizing it was during the bitter struggle over Chenjiahang, and they published photos meant to sway the public at home and abroad in their favor.
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Earlier in the campaign they had also claimed that China had been using sneezing gas, a chemical adopted by belligerents in the Great War. Shanghai’s mayor Yu Hongjun, a favorite among reporters for his quotable one-liners, replied promptly: ‘The Japanese sneeze because they’ve got cold feet.”
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De Fremery, the Dutch spy, believed neither side, basing his argument on considerable experience gathered through his own career in the artillery. “It seems to me highly unlikely the warring parties have used any form whatsoever of poisonous gases,” he wrote in a report. “I am well aware that at least until 1935 the Chinese were heavily opposed to this weapon of war and had not made any preparations for their use, not even for protecting themselves against such as weapon.”
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Ogishima Shizuo, the 27-year-old reservist of the 101st Japanese Division who had crossed Wusong Creek early on, was convinced he would not sur-vive the battle for Shanghai, and he started making preparations for his own death. The rotting bodies everywhere on the south bank of the creek told him what needed to be done. If he were killed, it was far from certain that anyone would have the time to have him cremated and send his ashes back to his mother. Instead, he packed a few belongings that he did not need at the front and arranged to have them shipped back home. That way, at least, his family would have some concrete objects to comfort them in their memory of him.
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After the first confusing days following the crossing, the frontline had stabilized somewhat. The two enemy armies stared at each other across 150 yards of no-man’s-land. Every now and then, the Japanese officers would order charges against the Chinese lines. The attacks invariably ended the same way. Rows of soldiers were cut down by the enemy’s heavy machine guns, and the survivors hastily retreated to their own lines. The unfortunates who were left between the frontlines with injuries so severe that they could not move were condemned to slow deaths, beyond rescue. Even though their screams were almost unbearable, no one dared to venture out and bring back their wounded comrades. The Chinese snipers never slept.

Incessant rain had turned the trenches into a knee-deep bog where cooking was impossible. Instead, meals consisted of handfuls of sticky rice. Weapons frequently malfunctioned. At one point, all the heavy machine guns in Ogishima’s company were sent back for repairs, forcing the soldiers in their dugouts to rely on their rifles and their bayonets, not much different from generations of infantrymen before them. Also like earlier generations of infantrymen, much of their talk revolved around how much worse off they were compared to the artillery and the transportation troops enjoying relatively comfortable lives far behind the front.

The officers grew paranoid that the mounting casualties and the abject conditions overall would cause dereliction in the ranks. The soldiers were regularly lined up so that their health status could be checked. Anyone trying to fake a disease ran the risk of being branded a deserter, and deserters were shot. The officers’ suspicions were not entirely baseless. “The soldiers in the frontline only have one thought on their minds,” Ogishima wrote in his diary. “They want to escape to the rear. Everyone envies those who, with light injuries, are evacuated. The ones who unexpectedly get a ticket back in this way find it hard to conceal their joy. As for those left in the frontline, they have no idea if their death warrant has already been signed, and how much longer they have to live.”

Like on the battlefields of Flanders a generation earlier, lives were expended on a massive scale in return for little or no territorial gain. Also like Flanders, the terrain favored defense. Nohara Teishin, a soldier from the 9th Division, lived through a terrible fight against an entrenched and partly invisible enemy who fired at the advancing Japanese through holes in the walls of abandoned farm buildings. The officers urged on the pri
vates, who charged across open fields. They would run for a short stretch, fall on their stomachs, catch their breath and resume the attack. Out of 200 men, only about ten were still fit to fight after the battle. “All my friends died there,” he later said. “You can’t begin to describe the wretchedness and misery of war.”
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Watanabe Wushichi, an officer who also served with the Japanese 9th Division, faced a special challenge. He was responsible for securing water supplies to soldiers in the frontline. It would seem to be a simple task in countryside filled with large and small streams, but not much of the water was potable. Ponds and creeks throughout the area were filled with the fly-covered corpses of men and horses emitting a horrible stench. For many soldiers, the thirst gradually became unbearable, and the moment someone stumbled over a new unpolluted well, the soldiers would crowd around it and, with surprising speed, turn it into a mud pool. To prevent that from happening, the officers posted soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets at each newly discovered water source.
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Like most other Japanese, Watanabe had been surprised by the tenacity of the Chinese defenders, and the sheer number of those willing to die for their cause. On the occasions when he had the chance to inspect conquered Chinese pillboxes, he was awestruck by the sight of dead defenders literally lying in layers. Childlike features showed that many of them couldn’t even have reached the age of 20. Some of the Chinese corpses were still clutching their rifles, and the Japanese often found it impossible to prise them from their hands. It was, they said, as if their ghosts had returned to offer resistance.
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