Bloody Saturday Page 4
I saw a white woman, kneeling in the blood and wreckage of Nanking Road, trying to aid her daughter in giving birth to a child as bullets, bomb fragments and debris flew about.
Ekins hadn’t been killed, and neither had Wang, who had gone for a walk while his boss was in the hotel. He had clambered out of the wrecked lobby of the Palace to help Morris report the devastation. Morris was covered in plaster and window glass and later reported that the explosions had been accompanied by ear-splitting noise. He looked out of the smashed window at the devastation on Nanking Road,
I could see at least fifty persons writhing on the sidewalks and roadway. Three foreigners were trying to crawl away over the bodies of the dead Chinese.
Victor Keene had arrived from the American Club and stood outside the Palace Hotel. He watched the injured doorman crawl towards the reception desk before he himself recoiled from another explosion caused by a fractured gas main. The blast sent up a geyser of dust and debris, killing many of the injured on the street outside who were unable to scramble away in time. Keene tried to call for ambulances from the Palace’s lobby telephones, but the lines were dead. He then tried to attend to some of the wounded in the lobby. He saw a stunned R.E. Rasche, a Swiss who worked for the local Union brewery in Shanghai, outside on the street with a bad head injury, slumped up against the wall of the hotel next to his friend and colleague Max Jakoby whose leg had been severed in the blast. Keene tried to help Rasche to his feet. All the Swiss man could say was, ‘I guess that’s the last of Jakoby.’ Rasche’s colleague was dead.
Ekins and Morris, along with their driver Wang, Victor Keene and Rhodes Farmer, moved among the dead and injured, trying to identify them. Keene counted forty bodies between the front door of the Cathay and the Bund waterfront; Morris counted one hundred in less than a block – ‘Some had their heads and arms blown off. Other lay with torn, twitching faces.’ The men tried to assist a foreigner who had had half his face blown away in the explosion, and then they helped an old Chinese man load his wounded son onto a handcart, now a makeshift ambulance, in the hope of getting him to a hospital in time.
Police and ambulances rushed to Nanking Road but they were simply overwhelmed by the number of people needing treatment. The scene within the Palace Hotel was one of carnage, wreaked by the bomb as it had travelled downwards through the building. Herr Boss, the Palace’s Swiss manager, shouted for ambulances. He had found dead and injured guests in many rooms – six seriously wounded people in one room alone – but there was little that could be done. Sections of the hotel were ablaze. Fire engines arrived with bells clanging and worked to put out the flames before they engulfed the entire building.
John Morris reported that the ambulance crews had to make the awful choice of only treating those who had a chance of living. There were just too many wounded who needed treatment. Many died by the side of Nanking Road and in the surrounding laneways and alleys for want of medical attention. The first co-ordinated response came half an hour later when a company of British Army armoured cars pushed through the crowds, bringing officers who set up a field hospital for the wounded and gathered up the dead. Many of the injured had to wait for the arrival of the armoured car before they could be treated. John Morris recalled seeing a friend of his, the popular Geordie and longtime China resident, John Findlay from Newcastle, waiting patiently for the ambulances in the devastated lobby of the Cathay Hotel. Wounded himself, Findlay spent his time comforting other injured guests, reassuring them that they would be all right and that more ambulances were coming.
The municipal ambulances and firemen were soon joined by volunteers from the Chinese Red Cross and Red Swastika (Buddhist) societies. Rhodes Farmer watched one Chinese nurse tending the wounded, ‘.
. . her white uniform quickly becoming as red as the badge on her arm’. He also saw a Japanese girl in high heels and western clothes, standing under the dead hands of the Cathay’s clock, directing the rescue parties towards any wounded on the street who could be saved.
Lucien Ovadia and the management of the Cathay moved through the hotel, evacuating the one hundred and fifty guests still in their rooms, as well as others who had been dining in the hotel. Those ushered to safety included a shocked Ellen Schmid and her mother, who had been on the roof taking photos when the bombs fell. Also among those escorted to safety were Eleanor B. Roosevelt and her son Quentin. After surveying the carnage outside, Eleanor urgently sought to make her way immediately to the American Consulate. As they stepped out of the entrance near the Sassoon Arcade, hotel staff kindly told them to take care – there was a four-foot deep shell crater in the pavement.
The SVC organised a convoy of commandeered furniture removal trucks to take the dead away. Rhodes Farmer, his white linen summer suit now covered in blood, was still at the scene and watched the young men of the SVC begin the grim task of gathering up the bodies. Farmer noted that the boys ‘. . . vomited into the gutter, then grinned self-consciously and got on with their grisly tasks’. Percy Finch grabbed the exhausted Farmer and told him he had done all he could and to come for a drink to steel his nerves.
Finch and Farmer walked into the wrecked Cathay and were amazed to find the Horse and Hounds bar still open. Farmer remembers the Chinese stewards producing a bottle of brandy and then recoiling when another drinker, a White Russian man, bent down from his stool, picked up a thumb from the floor, held it out and asked, ‘Any of you lose this?’
Many of the survivors from Nanking Road came under the care of Dr D.B. Cater at the modern Lester Chinese Hospital. Cater was a well-known, Cambridge-educated junior surgeon. After lecturing in pathology at Cambridge, Cater and his family had moved to Shanghai to work in the newly built six-storey, three hundred-bed hospital. Located on Shantung Road just a few blocks back from the Bund, it was the largest hospital in the vicinity of the Nanking Road blast site. The scale of the catastrophe quickly overwhelmed the Lester’s facilities. Cater claimed the hospital was ‘swamped’ with injured people lying on floors and out in the hospital’s courtyards.
By early evening, Cater and his team of surgeons had lost count of the number of amputations they had performed. For those of whom no surgery or care could help, morphine was given to ease the pain.
Other prominent Shanghailanders died in the blast outside the Cathay Hotel. An early tally of the dead included Reischauer, Williams, two Germans and a further two Russians, one of whom was identified as a man called Walter Turpin. A German guest at the Cathay had his leg torn off below the knee and bled to death; another guest sitting in the lobby was flung from his chair, slammed against a wall and killed. Among the injured survivors were J.M. Kerbey, who worked in Shanghai for the New York accountants Haskins and Sells, who was wounded by shrapnel outside the Palace Hotel. Montanan R.R. Rouse, a 44-year-old former Marine, was with his wife and daughter when he took shrapnel to his left shoulder and knee while in the passenger seat of his car near the Cathay. His wife and daughter, as well as the baby’s Chinese amah and Rouse’s Chinese chauffeur were unharmed despite the windscreen and all the windows in the car being blown out by the blast.
The number of Chinese dead was clearly large, but unverified – both in the total number and their individual names. Many, it seems, had been wounded by the blasts, crawled into the side streets and died anonymously.
Victor Keene helped to transport the wounded to hospital. Beyond the Lester, the nearest hospital was across the border in the French Concession – the Chinese Hospital on Thibet Road. Keene helped to load some wounded Chinese into a functioning car owned by a Canadian Shanghailander Dr W.S. Parsons who had been in the Palace Hotel. They set off towards Frenchtown, only to drive straight into another hell.
The Second Bomb – 4.43 p.m.
A second group of bombs fell at 4.43 p.m. approximately fifteen minutes after the first two exploded in Nanking Road. This time they struck at the corner of Thibet Road and the Avenue Eddy, right outside the Great World amusement palace. It was the French Concession’s busiest junction. The pavements around the entertainment complex were, as ever, thronged with the curious.
The Great World, the Da Shijie, had opened in 1917, though the magnificent Baroque-style building topped by a four-storey tower wasn’t completed until 1928. It was a Shanghai landmark, a first stop for Chinese visitors from out of town and foreign sojourners alike. It was akin to a London pleasure garden, spread across six floors and a large open roof space overlooking one of the most densely populated parts of the French Concession. Having visited several years earlier, the Hollywood movie director Josef von Sternberg described the scene he encountered at the Great World,
On the first floor were gaming tables, singsong girls, magicians, pick-pockets, slot machines, fireworks, birdcages, fans, stick incense, acrobats, and ginger. One flight up were the restaurants, a dozen different groups of actors, crickets and cages, pimps, midwives, barbers, and earwax extractors. The third floor had jugglers, herb medicines, ice cream parlors, a new bevy of girls, their high collared gowns slit to reveal their hips, and, under the heading of novelty, several rows of exposed toilets. The fourth floor was crowded with shooting galleries, fan-tan tables, revolving wheels, massage benches, acupuncture and moxa cabinets, hot towel counters, dried fish and intestines, and dance platforms . . . The fifth floor featured girls with dresses slit to the armpits, a stuffed whale, storytellers, balloons, peep shows, masks, a mirror maze, two love letter booths with scribes who guaranteed results, rubber goods, and a temple filled with ferocious gods and joss sticks. On the top floor and roof of that house of multiple joys a jumble of tightrope walkers slithered back and forth, and there were seesaws, Chinese checkers, mahjong, strings of firecrackers, lottery tickets, and marriage brokers.
This weekend the crowds throngin
g the Great World were added to by the fact that the ground floor had been converted into an emergency refugee centre for five thousand Chinese who had fled the bombardment of Chapei and Kiangwan. Charitable organisations were handing out free bowls of rice and tea, which swelled the numbers yet further. Rhodes Farmer, who had walked from Nanking Road round to the Great World to carry on reporting, noted the irony that many of those seeking shelter had contributed to the collection boxes at the Great World for the Chinese government’s ‘Buy-A-Bomber’ fund drive. It was apparent by then the bombs had fallen from a Chinese plane and had not come from the Idzumo’s guns.
An initially widely accepted belief surrounding the bombing of the Settlement was that a Chinese pilot, crippled by anti-aircraft fire from the Idzumo, had intended to limp back to Lunghwa, jettisoning his bombs on the nearby expanse of the racecourse en route. If that was the case then his miscalculation proved to be horrendously deadly.
The first bomb detonated shortly before hitting the ground, sending out a spray of deadly eviscerating shrapnel that killed people over seven hundred yards away. The second bomb hit the asphalt street and created a huge crater, ten feet by six, adjacent to a traffic control tower.
Bomb crater in front of the Great World
The bombs that exploded outside the Great World were more deadly than the first wave in Nanking Road. There was a greater concentration of people in the area and the bombs were made of shrapnel, which accounted for the high casualty rate at the Great World. The shrapnel spread across a wide arc, reaching as far as the racecourse where stray pieces of boiling hot metal caused the immediate cessation of a cricket game underway at the time.
South African reporter Henry John May, out interviewing refugees from Chapei, was just fifty yards from the front door of the Great World when the bomb struck. He was blown off his feet, thrown onto his back and winded. He gathered his breath and stood up, realising that many of the Chinese refugees he had just been talking to at the base of the building had been killed on impact. Many injuries had been rendered fatal by the intense gas pressure from the explosions; some bodies had simply evaporated.
After lunch with his family in their Frenchtown home, missionary Frank Rawlinson took a drive to get a newspaper, as was his regular Saturday afternoon habit. His wife Florence, and fifteen-year-old daughter Jean, decided to accompany him. They passed close to the Great World on their way home and encountered the crowds of Chapei and Kiangwan refugees outside. Rawlinson, always keen to help, slowed the car. Florence suggested he get out to see what was happening. Rawlinson was in the midst of stepping out of the front passenger seat when the first bomb dropped. He was immediately hit in the chest by flying shrapnel that pierced his heart and killed him instantly. His wife pulled him back into the vehicle, took the wheel herself and drove to the foreign mortuary. As well as their daughter Jean, the Rawlinsons had six older children back in America.
Brooklyn-born Bernhard ‘Bert’ Covit, a former newspaperman himself with the New York Post, witnessed the bombing at the Great World, having arrived at the junction of Avenue Eddy and Thibet Road just after the two bombs fell.
Bert Covit told the press that the area around the Great World was a mass of shrieking and terrified Chinese, ‘. . . windows for blocks around were shattered’. He waited for the fire and police services to arrive and then helped them load the dead, who ‘. . . looked mummified and inhuman’. Among the mostly Chinese dead he noted several blond heads.
One of the burnt out cars was ‘crushed like egg shells’, said the journalist M.C. Ford, Shanghai correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Inside were the remains of sixty-year-old Hubert Honigsberg, a pioneer San Franciscan Studebaker dealer who had become extremely wealthy from the city’s infatuation with the motorcar. Like Rawlinson, he had been driving past the Great World when the bombs struck. Flying red-hot shrapnel ignited the petrol tank of his car, incinerating him. Police were only able to identify his body later through documents in what was left of the glove compartment. Also in the car was the body of a woman passenger. She remained unidentified for several days until it was determined that the horrifically-charred corpse was that of Honigsberg’s wife, Madeleine.
Brother Shull, who managed the publishing activities of the Seventh Day Adventist Mission in Shanghai, was arriving in his car outside their printing presses virtually opposite the Great World. He saw the line of destroyed cars with the bodies still inside. Leaving his own, he walked through the devastation on the street to the mission’s premises. It was a grisly scene. Some ninety Chinese printers, out of a staff of a hundred, who printed the Seventh Day Adventist Mission magazine, had been killed in the blast.
Having driven past exploding vehicles that sent up sheets of flame on Nanking Road, Victor Keene was in one of the luckier cars passing the Great World when the bombs exploded. His car, carrying injured Chinese to the hospital just a hundred yards from the Great World, was unharmed and he managed to deliver the wounded to the hospital which was about to become overwhelmed by the injured from the Frenchtown blasts. Keene assumed that the number of casualties would be even greater at the Great World than on Nanking Road. He knew the open rooftop had been a popular site to watch the circling planes and the fires in Chapei. He also knew it had become a refugee centre for Chinese fleeing northern Shanghai who had made it into the Settlement. He tried not to think about how many might have perished.
Keene doubled back to the Great World to report on the disaster. He also noted the crushed cars and the number of dead on the street outside. Keene was angry at the Chinese, and asked why they had bombed the Settlement. He believed that the attacks on the Cathay and Great World were targeted to provocatively lure the foreign powers of the Settlement into the fight with Japan. He couldn’t understand the attack on the Great World given that the refugees within had moved south of Soochow Creek on the explicit advice of the Chinese government. He couldn’t believe it was all just an awful accident.
Vanya Oakes had checked out of the Astor House Hotel as planned and was in the large Huxinting teahouse in the old town’s Yu Yuan Gardens, close to the French Concession, when she heard the explosions. The bombs sounded awfully close and she headed in the direction of the Great World thinking it was the racecourse that had been hit by a crash-landing plane. On the corner of Avenue Eddy and Thibet Road she encountered pandemonium. She stumbled towards the blast crater on Thibet Road and watched water from a broken pipe shoot upwards as blood washed across the street and trickled into the crater. She joined the rescue effort and was told, ‘Look for those who are breathing – leave the others for now.’
Facing the Slaughter House
R. Somers from the Central Fire Station was in charge of the first engine that reached the Great World. He told Rhodes Farmer that, ‘A call came through to the station. I hadn’t got the faintest notion of what had happened although I coupled matters with the explosions I had heard.’ As he arrived aboard his engine, Somers recalled, ‘Facing that slaughter house there wasn’t even time to rub my eyes. The cries told me I wasn’t dreaming.’ He jumped from the engine and ran back across to the Settlement side of Avenue Eddy to find a telephone and call the Chief Officer for more ambulances. He found a shop with a public phone that still worked. The front windows had been blown out and the customers inside were horrifically injured. Somers realised he had no change to make the call and saw among the few survivors a man whose limbs has been fatally damaged. He could think of nothing to do but ask the man for change. The man reached into his jacket pocket with his one good arm and handed Somers a five cent coin. Somers thanked him and turned to make the call. After requesting more ambulances, Somers turned back to the man to see if he could help him, but he had died.