Bloody Saturday
ABOUT THE BOOK
Saturday, August 14, 1937 – that summer Shanghai was expecting to be hit by a typhoon of ‘violent intensity’. The typhoon passed, but what did strike Shanghai was a man-made typhoon of bombs and shrapnel that brought aerial death and destruction such as no city had ever seen before. The clock outside the Cathay Hotel stopped at 4.27 p.m. precisely as the first bombs landed on the junction of the Nanking Road and the Bund; the second wave of explosions struck the dense crowds outside the Great World amusement centre in the French Concession. Bloody Saturday reconstructs the events of that dreadful day from eyewitness accounts.
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CONTENTS
About the Book
A Note on Spelling
Prologue: The Approaching Storm
Saturday, 14 August, 1937
The Day After: Sunday, 15 August, 1937
Appendix of Landmarks
Notes
Photographs
Acknowledgements
Also By Paul French
Sneak Peek: City of Devils, A Shanghai Noir
Preview: Introduction
Preview: Prologue
Imprint
A NOTE ON SPELLING
Throughout this book I have used the Wade-Giles romanisations of Chinese provinces, districts, rivers, creeks, towns and cities, as these would have been in common use in 1937. The current pinyin romanisations are listed in the appendix of this book for clarification.
Prologue: The Approaching Storm
A Shanghai August is invariably a hot and humid affair. The city’s population swelters in the airless heat that begins each daybreak, giving little respite until the few cool hours before dawn of the following day. Residents able to afford electricity in 1937 ran their desktop Swan fans all night long, and nightclubs that advertised air conditioning consequently attracted good business. Other venues simply placed large blocks of melting ice in the middle of the dancefloor to keep the temperature down. The Shanghainese dragged camp beds into the lilong alleyways and slept outside to avoid the stifling indoor conditions.
What traditionally offers Shanghai some relief in August are the rains and gusts of wind swept towards the city from the edges of the typhoons that rage out in the South China Sea. It is one of Shanghai’s secrets of success that the city is, normally, typhoon-free. They sweep across the sea, causing annual devastation in Taiwan and the Philippines. If typhoons make landfall on China’s coast it is usually further to the south, below Amoy, down to Hong Kong and Macao.
Some erroneous weather reports stated that Shanghai was hit by a typhoon of ‘violent intensity’ that August. But what really struck the city was a man-made assault of bombs, shrapnel and bullets, bringing aerial death and destruction such as no city had ever seen before.
Throughout the 1930s, governments had greatly feared the devastation aerial bombing could cause in the event of war. From the very inception of planes, their military importance had been recognised – not least in H.G. Wells’ 1907 science-fiction novel The War in the Air. The German Zeppelin raids on London and other English towns in the First World War had been a portent of what might come.
Certainly, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin summed up the general fear of aerial bombing and the destruction it might cause when he told the British parliament in 1932, ‘I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.’
Certainly Baldwin’s analysis seemed to have been borne out in April 1937 when the German Condor Legion bombed the Spanish town of Guernica. That horrific aerial onslaught prompted Picasso’s mural-sized oil painting. Completed that June, Guernica detailed the horror of the devastation, and elicited both outrage at the fascist bombers and sympathy for the Spanish Republican cause when it was exhibited at the Paris Exposition.
The bombs that fell on Shanghai just several months after Guernica, on 14 August 1937, also fell on unprepared civilians, but in the world’s fifth largest, and by far most densely populated, city of three and a half million people.
Over one thousand civilians were killed at Guernica; at Shanghai, over two thousand lives were lost and many more were injured. ‘Bloody Saturday’, as it quickly became known, was a portent of what was to come to other cities including Chungking, London, Manchester, Liverpool, Antwerp, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, and so many others in the Second World War.
The Last Moments Before War
That August, a typhoon raged unexpectedly close to the coast and prevented commercial shipping from entering the port of Shanghai. Heavy gales blew in from the sea, toppling trees, bringing down telegraph poles and causing havoc for the city’s telephone system. Scheduled steamer departures were delayed and commercial air services between Shanghai and Canton were temporarily suspended. Only the hardiest of rickshaw pullers remained on the streets.
The Whangpoo River that runs through the centre of Shanghai, with the densely populated International Settlement to the west and the industrial and agricultural Pootung district to the east, was free of the clutter of steamers, lighters, liners and tramps that usually swarmed the waterway. Dominating the Whangpoo, adjacent to Shanghai’s majestic Bund waterfront, were the battleships of several nations in what was known as ‘Battleship Alley’.
As the storm skirted Shanghai traffic and pedestrians appeared once more on the streets, ships finally departed port while others docked and air services partially resumed. Life in the International Settlement of Shanghai, run by a foreign-dominated Municipal Council, equipped with its own police force and courts, returned to normal. The neighbouring French Concession, also known as Frenchtown, similarly picked itself up and resumed business. However, across Soochow Creek in the north, things were about to become far less placid. Here were the sprawling Hongkew and Yangtzepoo districts, as well as the Chinese-controlled portions of the city comprising Chapei, Paoshan and Kiangwan.
Texan Claire Lee Chennault had retired after twenty years of service from the American Army Air Corps on 30 April 1937; the next day he boarded a ship for China. He had been appointed to a three-month contract to produce a confidential survey of the Chinese Air Force (CAF) for the Nanking government.
Chennault was aware of American involvement in China’s fledgeling CAF. Americans had established the Central Aviation School at Hangchow.
Chennault, who looked more like a prize-fighter than one of America’s top military strategists, arrived in June after a stop in Japan to snoop around the country’s air defence and attack capabilities. He sat down to tea with his new boss, Soong May-ling, better known as Madame Chiang, the powerful wife of China’s Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Convinced that Nationalist China needed a modern air force, it had been May-ling who had pushed for its development and championed the CAF cause.
Claire Lee Chennault
During Chennault’s stay in Nanking, the Japanese had invaded Peking and he found himself suddenly promoted from an outside observer to a key strategist in the planning of Nationalist China’s response to the onslaught. At the time, Chennault had noted in his diary that ‘the Chinese Air Force is not ready for war.’
Peking and Tientsin had fallen to Japanese invasion in mid-July. While battles raged across the broad swathe of Northern China from Jehol to Mongolia, Shanghai remained calm on China’s eastern seaboard. Rumours ran rife that Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government had done a deal with Tokyo – the Japanese could control China north of the Yangtze if he was left to run the country to the south of the river. Many believed it, though it wasn’t true. Japan’s aggression was not to be appeased.
*
On Monday, 9 August, two Japanese soldiers tried to force their way into Shanghai’s Hungjao Aerodrome to the west of the city. They were shot by Chinese Peace Preservation Corps guards, armed gendarmes and the only Chinese force in the area, one of whom was killed in the attack. The Japanese press dubbed the incident ‘The Aerodrome Murders’, inciting Japanese public opinion against China.
The Chinese said it was a provocation by the Japanese; Tokyo said the incident was staged by the Chinese to excuse the movement of troops into Shanghai. Either way, Japan ordered its warships to conve
rge on Shanghai; in response China moved the elite Eighty-Eighth Division closer to the city.
On Wednesday 11 August, the Japanese Third Fleet arrived. The flagship armoured cruiser Idzumo was accompanied by an aircraft carrier, the Kaga, and fourteen other naval craft. They anchored in the Whangpoo River, directly in front of the International Settlement. The Idzumo remained just offshore from the Japanese Consulate.
American journalist Vanya Oakes had pitched up in Shanghai in 1933 thinking to escape the Depression back home and find a job. She did, at the China Press newspaper, an American-run English language daily. Oakes was between apartments and staying at the Astor House Hotel in Hongkew, just over the Soochow Creek, opposite the Soviet Consulate and a stone’s throw from the heavily sandbagged and protected Japanese Consulate. That night she lay in bed and nervously listened to the hum of the Idzumo’s generators close by on the Whangpoo.
Battle Cruiser Idzumo moored alongside the Japanese Consulate
Vanya Oakes
Further troop transports loaded with Japanese Marines anchored downriver. Over five thousand Marines of the Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces went ashore at the privately-owned wharves of the Osaka Shosen Kaisha, Nippon Yusen Kaisha and the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha corporations, as well as the Japanese Naval jetties, all on the Pootung side of the Whangpoo opposite the Yangtzepoo and Hongkew districts of the International Settlement. The Japanese Naval Command demanded that all Chinese troops retreat to a distance of thirty miles or more from Shanghai. The Chinese refused and ordered up the modernised and well-trained Eighty-Seventh Division from Nanking to join the Eighty-Eighth, the two best-trained Divisions of the newly formed Ninth Army Group.
At dawn on Thursday 12 August, the Japanese gunboats Seta and Kuri began to shell the Chinese portions of northern Shanghai from their anchorages on the Whangpoo. Outside the International Settlement’s borders, the Chinese-administered districts of Chapei and Kiangwan took the brunt of the shelling. Most cannon fire was aimed towards the buildings of Shanghai University where, close by, the Japanese landing forces intended to build an airfield to allow them to ferry in additional men and material to the city.
Australian Rhodes Farmer was the roving war correspondent for the Melbourne Herald. He had been in China for less than a year, ‘. . . learning the ins and outs of chopsticks and Far Eastern politics (which mostly go together) in Shanghai.’ Farmer watched the Japanese begin to fortify their positions around Chapei and witnessed the start of the shelling.
One evening the Chinese suburb seemed normal enough, its alleyways crowded with gossiping merchants and shop owners smoking their long pipes in the cool of the evening, and children playing their eternal Chinese version of hopscotch. But by dawn thousands of Chinese soldiers had moved in, silent as nighthawks on straw sandals . . .
The naval bombardment of Chapei was followed by incursions from Japanese troops in Midget two-man tanks and foot patrols. The Japanese brought up field guns to support the fighting along the Shanghai-Woosung rail line. A total of thirty-three Japanese battleships were now gathered at Shanghai, or close by at Woosung, and so control of the rail line was crucial for the Japanese if they were to speedily reinforce their troops in the city.
The fighting was fiercest around Hongkew Park and the rifle range where the Japanese command were bunkering in. United Press correspondent H.R. ‘Bud’ Ekins drove up to the park with his colleague John Morris, another veteran reporter who had been based in Nanking and was friendly with Madame Chiang.
Ekins and Morris saw Japanese motorcycles with machine guns mounted on the pillions and a Midget tank guarding the crossing of the Shanghai-Woosung rail line. Moving between Hongkew Park and the North Railway Station they encountered erratic sniper fire. The Chinese Army were erecting concrete pillboxes, sandbagging street corners and digging tank traps. During the day the North Railway Station’s sturdy ferroconcrete administrative building was turned into a fortress. From the roof, spotters could see the Japanese Special Naval Landing troops in Hongkew. Meanwhile Chinese Peace Preservation Forces, local militarised police units, were mobilised and began patrols of the Soochow Creek’s embankments and the Chinese-controlled portions of Chapei. They rolled out barbed wire and re-fortified all strategic street corners close to the North Railway Station, pointed their guns eastwards and waited.
The area around the station was contested territory with checkpoints established by both the Japanese Army and the Russian detachment of the local territorials, the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC). Close by, on Range Road, a Japanese post was under constant fire from Chinese snipers positioned in nearby houses and on rooftops. John Morris was forced to find sanctuary in a Buddhist temple on Range Road, within the Japanese-controlled zone. He borrowed their telephone to call in his on-the-spot observations to the United Press offices over the other side of Soochow Creek on the Avenue Edward VII. It was crowded and noisy – three hundred Japanese refugees from nearby ‘Little Tokyo’ were seeking sanctuary on straw mats in the temple.
Madame Chiang had asked Claire Lee Chennault to fly to Shanghai and report back to her on the situation. Chennault observed the build-up of Japanese troops north of Soochow Creek and witnessed the arrival of the Japanese Third Fleet. He returned to Nanking on the afternoon of Friday 13 to sit in on the Generalissimo’s War Council. Chiang informed the Council on what Chennault had seen with his own eyes, that the Idzumo and other Japanese ships had started to shell Chapei, and that they were the major support for the Japanese land forces. Madame Chiang asked Chennault to recommend action in retaliation. He advocated sending bombers to attack the Idzumo. As there were no Chinese air officers experienced in this sort of operation, Chennault was asked to take charge. The Chinese presented an ultimatum to the Japanese demanding they withdraw their troops from Chapei by 4 p.m., or face retaliation.
The International Settlement moved to protect itself as the Chinese quarters in the north of the city burned. Admiral Harry F. Yarnell, the commander of America’s thirty-nine vessel-strong Asiatic Fleet in the Far East, was aboard his flagship USS Augusta moored offshore from Tsingtao. Yarnell gave the order to weigh anchor and steam the three hundred and sixty-seven nautical miles southwards at full speed to Shanghai to take charge of American forces in the city. He cabled ahead orders for troops aboard the USS Sacramento, already stationed in the Whangpoo’s Battleship Alley, to immediately go ashore and take up guard positions in the Yangtzepoo district, close to the bombed Chinese areas. They built sandbagged machinegun emplacements outside the generators of the Shanghai Power Company to prevent the city being plunged into total darkness. Further American Navy guards were placed outside the Socony-Vacuum oil terminal and Texaco’s Shanghai terminal.
Likewise, the British North Lancashire Regiment, known as the ‘Loyals’, stationed in the Settlement, mustered for action. Britain had a total of nine hundred and fifty soldiers in the city. They prepared sandbags and machine gun emplacements along the southern banks of Soochow Creek, typically filled with sampans, and stood ready to repel any Japanese advance southwards, down from Chapei and into the central Settlement. Soldiers began running field telephone lines along Brenan Road, on the far western borders of the Settlement by Jessfield Park, to ensure continued communication if the city’s telephone system went down. Rhodes Farmer began to report from the British side of the barbed wire perimeter where the Lancashire Loyals were embedded.
The American and British consulates used local radio station X.H.M.A. and the late editions of the Shanghai Evening Post to advise all their nationals to evacuate the Chinese portions of northern Shanghai to the southern side of Soochow Creek. The idea was to move them to safety, but it was still a dangerous operation that exposed civilians to trigger-happy Japanese soldiers who were roaming the streets. One British man was shot dead crossing the creek as well as three White Russian refugees who were attempting to flee across from the Chapei side. Standing guard near the contested North Railway Station, a British SVC member was shot and wounded in the shoulder.