Bloody Saturday Read online

  The ever-busy John Morris had spent Saturday morning back up on the roof of Broadway Mansions with Randall Gould. It offered one of the best views across northern Shanghai to survey the extent of the Japanese attack. Looking across to the Settlement it seemed every rooftop along the Bund was packed with people watching the skies that burned orange with the flames from Chapei. He noted the glinting reflection of dozens of pairs of binoculars. The Japanese attack on Chapei had become a spectator sport. Down along the Bund, close by the junction of the waterfront and the Settlement’s major east-west artery of Nanking Road, he saw thousands of refugees. They had crossed the Garden Bridge out of Chapei and Hongkew seeking sanctuary from the Japanese attack. Together with a few curious Shanghailanders, they formed a cluster on the corner occupied by the massive Cathay Hotel, all looking skywards.

  Overnight, Claire Lee Chennault had considered his pilots’ lack of training and the adverse weather conditions, but had finally decided to go ahead with the mission. The first Chinese bombers took off from Lunghwa Aerodrome at around 10 a.m. Rhodes Farmer was standing on the roof of the North-China Daily News Building, known as the ‘Old Lady of the Bund’ at quarter past ten that morning. He watched five Chinese bombers fly towards the Whangpoo and the Idzumo at about five thousand feet in a tight ‘V’ formation. The Idzumo’s anti-aircraft guns opened up, and were joined by those on the other Japanese ships in a deafening roar. The five Chinese planes passed over the Idzumo heading north, up towards the Japanese military command bunker in Hongkew Park. At 11 a.m., and again shortly afterwards at 11.20 a.m., came two waves of CAF Curtiss Hawk’s that flew straight into what Farmer described as ‘an impenetrable wall of bursting shells’. Most held their course despite the bombardment. One released its bombs but they accidentally overshot and hit the Shanghai-Hongkew Wharf on the Pootung side of the river.

  Londoner Charles Head, Chief Accountant of the wharf, was seriously injured by the bomb. Two of his Portuguese employees were similarly wounded by shrapnel while three of his Chinese workers were killed and another ten seriously hurt.

  Vanya Oakes had gone to the China Press offices near Avenue Edward VII to file her impressions of Chapei that dawn. She then joined some colleagues for coffee at the Palace Hotel on Nanking Road. They had finally persuaded her to move hotels and she decided to go back and pack immediately. As she tried to cross the Garden Bridge to the Astor, she found it heavy going against the stream of Chinese refugees fleeing Chapei for the central Settlement. As the bomb hit the Shanghai-Hongkew Wharf nearby Oakes was trapped on the bridge and thought her eardrums would burst.

  The refugees had been squeezed into a funnel to cross the narrow Garden Bridge into the Settlement. As the Idzumo’s guns opened fire at 11 a.m., panic struck the crowd. Frightened refugees scrambled over their hastily dropped bundles in their attempts to get into the Settlement. Trying to move against the manic crowd, Oakes was pushed to the edge of the bridge and had to grab hold of the iron railings to avoid being swallowed up in the stampede or tipped into the creek. Several people were trampled to death in the panicked confusion; Oakes felt the breath squeezed out of her. As Rhodes Farmer also crossed the bridge, he ‘slipped in blood and flesh’ and felt the sickening crunch of the very young and the very old who had fallen under the waves of pushing refugees. The Japanese sentries were unable to control the situation and lashed out with their bayonets. Several older Chinese were stabbed. The sentries dumped the lifeless body of one bayoneted old man off the Garden Bridge and into the Soochow Creek below.

  Vanya Oakes simply wasn’t strong enough to push through the crowd. She changed direction and went back to the Bund side, hoping to get a sampan across Soochow Creek to the Astor. The river was, as usual, packed with sampans. She took off her high heels and started ‘sampan hopping’, jumping from one flimsy craft to another in the hope of making it to the other side.

  More bombs fell as Oakes jumped from one boat to another, high heels and purse in hand, much to the amusement of the boat owners. She made it to the northern bank just as the 11.20 a.m. planes screeched in overhead. She quickly found shelter with a friendly boatman under the canvas awning of his sampan. Bombs fell towards Pootung and shrapnel from the Japanese anti-aircraft guns rained down, killing the occupants of one boat just fifty feet away. After the planes roared away, Oakes went ashore and into the Astor to pack her suitcase.

  For those in their offices near the Bund like Lucien Ovadia, Carl Crow and Frank Rawlinson, they could feel the windows rattle in the morning bombing raids. First at 11 a.m. and then again at 11.20 a.m., they heard the Chinese bombers fly over, explosions and then the response of the Idzumo’s big guns. The roof of Rawlinson’s Missions Building was crowded with spectators who covered their heads as shrapnel rattled down onto the roof. Charles Luther Boynton of the National Christian Council of Churches ordered everyone off the roof and then padlocked it to ensure the more curious didn’t return. Frank Rawlinson consequently decided to get in his car and drive home to the French Concession for lunch with his family.

  The Calm Before the Storm

  The first bombing run had failed to score a hit on the Idzumo. Shanghai returned to normal for several hours and the skies remained clear. A.D. Williams counted himself lucky to be dining at the luxurious Cathay Hotel that Saturday. As the accountant for the North-China Daily News, he wasn’t usually the one taken to lunch or drinks. He sat at his desk most days from nine to six, watching the journalists and editors saunter in and out all day from tiffins, dinners and Shanghai’s great tradition of ‘Sundowner’ drinks. He saw their expenses, he knew how much of the company budget was spent on entertaining. But today, a major client of the paper had decided to buy the North-China’s accountant lunch – it was he, after all, who could suddenly decide whether too much was being spent on newsprint or ink. Williams was being courted at one of the best restaurants in town and he was enjoying it.

  Alongside the Cathay Hotel was Sassoon Arcade, which housed a popular tea shop as well as some of Shanghai’s finest and most expensive antique and curio stores. Above the retail premises were any number of important businesses including the busy offices of travel agents Thomas Cook, a Chinese government telegram office, American Express and the always crowded Mme. Verette Institute de Beauté. Tourists loved the arcade for its curio stores – the Green Dragon, the Peking Treasure Shop, Cathay Arts, Grays Yellow Lantern Shop run by husband and wife proprietors Bill and Dolly Gray, and especially Hoggard-Sigler, who specialised in very rare and terribly dear bronzes, brasses and Chinese art and objets. Saturdays were always busy for the shops and offices of Sassoon Arcade and this one was no exception.

  For those Shanghailanders and tourists who were out shopping and enjoying late lunches or early cocktails after the morning’s excitements, the second phase of Claire Lee Chennault’s plan to sink the Idzumo came as a surprise. Many Chinese were still fleeing across the Garden Bridge from burning Chapei, and congregating on the Bund before they could disperse to various refugee centres in the Settlement and Frenchtown. For these poor souls the new assault was simply terrifying. At approximately 4 p.m. the Idzumo opened up its antiaircraft guns once more and began firing two hundred feet into the sky, though no actual planes had yet been sighted.

  At close to 4.30 p.m. Rhodes Farmer, still on the roof of the North-China Daily News Building, saw ten Northrop bombers with CAF markings appear over the Settlement. The leading six planes disappeared into low-hanging cloud coverage while the rear four veered off their course. Two bombs, and then a further two, fell from beneath one of the planes.

  Farmer would later report that the typhoon winds had caught the bombs and were blowing them back towards the Settlement. He held his breath, thinking the bombs would hit the British destroyer nearby. They just missed. The first bomb hit the water and sent up a giant waterspout. The second bomb slammed into a cluster of fragile sampans and sprayed brown muddy water and boat parts up onto the Bund, wiping out their occupants completely. The next two bombs were due to land slightly further back across the Bund. Farmer knew then that he was ‘. . . dead centre in Asia’s first blitz’. He stood transfixed as the bombs rained down towards the Palace and Cathay hotels, and the crowded junction of Nanking Road and the Bund.

  Victor Keene, the New York Tribune’s hard drinking and fun-loving Shanghai correspondent who also wrote for the local China Press, was on the roof of the American Club on Foochow Road, a block away from the Cathay. He watched the same formation of CAF Northrop bombers fly across the Settlement, noting that they were the planes that had been presented to Chiang Kai-shek on the occasion of his last birthday. Keene saw the anti-aircraft guns on the decks of the Idzumo open fire. The shrapnel fallout out was immediate and long range as it fell back earthwards, wounding a Chinese waiter standing next to him. Keene then saw four black dots appear below the planes – bombs, dislodged from their racks – that began falling towards the Settlement, short of their target. The first two slammed into the Whangpoo. Keene was aghast as he realised that the next two bombs were going to miss the Idzumo and fall towards the Bund. He immediately scrambled off the roof and headed towards Nanking Road.

  Ellen Schmid and her mother stood on the roof of the Cathay and watched the Chinese planes fly over from the west and head towards the river and the great grey hulk of the Idzumo. They watched in horror as several bombs fell from the bottom of one of the bombers and:

  . . . drifted downward. Our eyes followed it down. There was a blinding flash. For a minute or two we couldn’t see anything but the flash. Then flames and smoke shot up. The explosion was so loud we couldn’t hear the anti-aircraft guns anymore. Just a few seconds later two more bombs fell. There were two more flashes and two more explosions. We ran inside.

  Then for a few se
conds, as Rhodes Farmer remembered, Shanghai went ‘as silent as a morgue’.

  The First Blast – 4.27 p.m.

  The first bomb to hit the Settlement weighed 2000 lb and hit the Palace Hotel at precisely 4.27 p.m. It passed straight through the roof and plummeted downwards through the building. The hotel’s tea lounge, restaurant, lobby and bar were all destroyed. Many of the dead and injured were found later, still in their rooms. Part of the Palace’s façade had been blown away and had begun to collapse. One man, blown out of his room on the fourth floor, clung perilously to the edge of the building. Nobody could reach him and he eventually plummeted to the ground, smashing through the glass awning of the hotel entranceway and onto the pavement.

  The second bomb struck seconds later bearing directly down on Nanking Road. It glanced off the side of the Cathay Hotel’s ferroconcrete structure, cracked the canopy covering the entranceway and exploded into the tarmac. Shrapnel hit the clock on the front of the Cathay, which stopped at 4.27 p.m. exactly. The bomb left a gaping crater right outside the front doors. Always a busy intersection, the street instantly became a mass of burnt-out cars. Flames licked from a gutted Lincoln Zephyr parked near the hotel’s entrance. Its whitewall tyres were still a brilliant white but the body had been reduced to a chassis shell. Next to it stood a bicycle, standing upright as if waiting for its owner to return and claim it. Fallen telegraph poles and twisted streetcar wires amid a sea of broken plate glass created barriers across the road. Loosened masonry from the Palace and the Cathay fell at random points. Blinding acrid smoke and, after a momentary silence in the wake of the bomb, the screams of the injured and dying rose up. A fire blazed.

  Site of the bombing near the Palace Hotel

  Scene of the bombing between the Palace Hotel and the Cathay Hotel on Nanking Road

  The Bund end of Nanking Road was carnage. Dead and dismembered bodies littered the street. Charred corpses had been flung by the blast as far as the waterfront, landing on the dead who moments before had been clustered together watching the skies above. Seven hundred, overwhelmingly Chinese, refugees had been crowded around the waterfront junction, seeking shelter from the rain and winds. Many died instantly; others were horribly injured. Percy Finch, the veteran City Editor of the North-China Daily News, had been on the roof of the newspaper’s building just along the Bund.

  It seemed as if a giant mower had pushed through the crowd of refugees, chewing them to bits. Here was a headless man; there a baby’s foot, wearing its little redsilk shoe embroidered with fierce dragons. Bodies were piled in heaps by the capricious force of the explosions. Women still clutched their precious bundles. One body, that of a young boy, was flattened high against a wall, to which it clung with ghastly adhesion.

  Carl Crow was putting the final touches to his report for Colgate, hoping to catch the last post. He was planning to finish up his day’s work and head to the American Club, where he was Treasurer, for a few whisky sodas and maybe a game of Texas Hand Poker before returning home to his wife Helen and their villa house on well-healed Connaught Road. He never finished the report. The windows in his office blew out as the first bomb exploded outside the Cathay one street away. Miraculously none of the shattering glass cut him as he ducked under his desk. He recalled hearing the sound of machine gunfire ripping through the air, followed by a burst of shrapnel from an anti-aircraft gun somewhere nearby. He assumed it came from the Idzumo just across the river. Getting up, Crow peered out of his shattered window to see mayhem on the street below. Filling the scene were abandoned rickshaws, wheel-barrows and terrified citizens running for cover.

  He wasn’t the only cowering businessman. In the next building, Canadian insurance broker Martin Gold was sitting at his desk when a massive lump of shrapnel blew out the window and missed his head by an inch. A.D. Williams stepped out the front door of the Cathay Hotel and shook hands with his lunch host who retreated back inside to his suite. He stood on the street outside and lit a cigarette, turning down towards the Old Lady of the Bund and his office with the desk, files, blotters, ledgers and adding machinery. He looked up at the clock that hung over the entrance of the hotel lobby. It said 4.27 p.m. Williams was killed instantly as the bomb landed almost directly on top of him.

  Rhodes Farmer walked down several flights of stairs as the Old Lady of the Bund’s elevators had stopped working. He then grabbed his Chinese photographer from under the darkroom table and they rushed along the waterfront to Nanking Road. At the junction, Farmer encountered a decapitated Sikh Shanghai Municipal Police officer ‘. . . with his arms outstretched as though against oncoming traffic’. Looking up Nanking Road towards the entrance of the Cathay, Farmer saw

  . . . Flames from blazing cars incinerating the bodies of their riddled occupants. In grotesque heaps where they had been huddling in doorways and annexes of the Cathay and Palace Hotels were heaps of refugees whose blue coolie clothes were turning red. Heads, arms, legs lay far from mangled trunks. For the full long stretch of both buildings, the pavements and roadway were littered with bodies.

  Lucien Ovadia was hurled across the room ‘like a rag doll’ by the second blast that had glanced the Cathay. He was lucky that his windows had been open and the blast hadn’t sent deadly shards of glass flying back into the room. He sat on the floor, stunned, for a minute or two. Then amazingly, given the devastation of the office around him, his telephone rang. It was Louis Suter, the Swiss manager of the Cathay, wishing to inform him that a bomb had fallen and destroyed the hotel’s canopy. Ovadia went down in the still working elevator and exited Sassoon House into Sassoon Arcade.

  The arcade was devastated. The windows of Grays Yellow Lantern shop had been completely blown out. Priceless Chinese objets d’art and expensive items of Lalique glassware were smashed on the floor amid bits of flesh and blood. All the shops in the arcade, including Alexander Clark’s jewellers on the first floor and the Western Union offices, were badly damaged and many staff were wounded. Hoggard-Sigler was seriously damaged. Intricate ivory carvings, ruby red Peking glass bowls, beautiful statues of the Goddess Guanyin, jade ornaments, lacquer furniture and silk brocades had all been destroyed. The proprietor, Clarence Hoggard, would never be able to open the store again. Fortunately, a party of twenty-four visiting schoolteachers, who had been taking tea in the arcade shortly before the bomb fell, had set off to explore Shanghai’s old town and had just missed the explosion.

  After the Initial Shock

  Rhodes Farmer felt the ‘sticky sweet stench of blood’ in his nostrils. Across the tramlines that ran down Nanking Road to the Bund was the body of a tall European in a white suit – the suit was still immaculate though his head had been cleanly sliced off. He saw petrified tourists still sitting at their seats in the Palace’s cocktail lounge, which had somehow escaped destruction. A colleague, who had only earlier asked him to go for a drink at the Palace, lay dead on his back, staring sightlessly towards the sky. Two Russian men helped Farmer lift the body by the shoulders, but a terrible stomach wound made it impossible. Farmer began to help carry the wounded in from the street, fearing that the bombers might return.

  Farmer and the two Russians tried to carry a young man with dark hair into the Palace. His leg had been severely injured and he was unconscious. Farmer attempted to drag him through the revolving doors of the Palace, but they were jammed with broken glass. The men began to smash out some street-facing windows to get him inside. Farmer realised that it was Robert Reischauer, who he had interviewed only two days before. As soon as the first ambulances arrived, Reischauer was rushed to hospital, but he died a few hours later from a combination of shock and blood loss. The remainder of his party were mostly playing bridge in the hotel and had survived. Paul Amos, another Princeton academic in the party, had gone for a stroll along the Bund and had missed the blast. He ran back to the hotel to see ‘the street lined with bleeding bodies, torn and mangled. Huge slivers of glass fell to the street from windows.’

  United Press correspondents Bud Ekins and John Morris were just around the corner from the Cathay at their office. The very border of the Settlement and the French Concession was the Avenue Edward VII, known to all Shanghailanders as the ‘Avenue Eddy’. The concentrated strip of press offices on the street was known locally as ‘Newspaper Alley’. After covering the fighting in Chapei for forty-eight hours straight, Ekins and Morris had decided to take a late and well-deserved lunch at the Cathay. Morris had then stayed in the Cathay to interview some guests while Ekins went across to the Palace Hotel to meet some other journalists he knew and try to work out why the Idzumo’s anti-aircraft guns were firing at an apparently empty sky. Morris was in the lobby of the Cathay about to leave; Ekins was in the lobby of the Palace. Both were about to step out onto the street; both escaped sudden death by seconds. Morris was forced to jump through a broken plate glass window to exit the lobby of the Cathay since the front entrance was blocked by the destroyed canopy. He saw their car with the front wheels blown off and assumed Ekins must have been killed along with their driver Wang. Morris was moved and wrote up his report, which was cabled back across the Pacific that night. Thanks to the international dateline, he made the late editions of the American newspapers,