Bloody Saturday Page 5

  The streets to the south of Avenue Eddy were in the French Concession and so it was the French gendarmes that responded to the tragedy first. Those at the recently built and very modern Mallet Station, the Poste Mallet, on Avenue Eddy realised immediately where the bomb had hit and were quick to arrive on the scene. Gendarmes from French Police HQ on Route Stanislas Chevalier arrived soon after, including Nicolai Slobodchikoff. Outside on the bombed street he encountered ‘crowds’ of corpses on the pavement around the Great World.

  Shortly after Slobodchikoff and other French gendarmes reached the scene, a division of the SVC’s Russian Company arrived from the Avenue Joffre Fire Station. Among them was young Boris Ivanovich, who still had no uniform but had borrowed a tin helmet. Marching at the double down from the Avenue Joffre to Thibet Road, Ivanovich walked past the Metropole Cinema, where he had been sitting watching a Hollywood western the previous evening. The lobby of the cinema was now a hastily assembled refuge for the injured and dying. Joined by the Chinese company of the SVC, who had been barracked not far from the Great World at the Cathedral Boy’s School, the police and Volunteers began to sort the wounded from the dead, and the hopeless cases from those who might have a chance of survival if they could get treatment.

  Together Slobodchikoff and Ivanovich commandeered a French Concession flatbed garbage truck and loaded twenty-one badly wounded Chinese onto it. By the time they found a hospital able to take them, all but five had died. Slobodchikoff and Ivanovich were instructed to take the bodies to a cemetery in Siccawei, on the western fringes of the Concession, and bury them in a hastily dug mass grave. The two men were tasked with bringing some dignity to the dead by matching body parts to make whole bodies. It was a gruesome job and Slobodchikoff recalled the excruciating smell. When Slobodchikoff finally got back to French Police HQ his commanding inspector was shocked to see him covered in blood and white as a ghost. He poured him a shot of rum.

  Word of the blasts spread fast across the city. George Stewart who worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was sitting in the bar at the Race Club, a large clock tower that afforded a view of the east, encompassing the racecourse and the Great World. He heard a deafening bang and the clock tower shook. Someone who had been standing on a balcony and seen the Chinese planes passing overhead shouted, ‘The bastards have dropped it.’ Minutes later Stewart’s acquaintance Harold Reynell, a First World War veteran, came into the bar for a stiffening drink. He had been in the traffic jam outside the Great World when the bombs hit but somehow his car had avoided combustion. His Chinese chauffeur had got them out of the area quickly and Reynolds had instructed him to head straight for the Race Club.

  The socialite, author, New Yorker correspondent and general girl-about-town Emily ‘Mickey’ Hahn was across the Settlement on the far western Yu Yuen Road, where she was house-sitting for friends who had evacuated to Hong Kong. She was close to the western edge of the Settlement, but even there occasionally, ‘. . . a little shrapnel fell into the garden or onto the roof ’. Shortly after the explosions, Mickey met a Chinese friend who said he had been close by and had left the scene after seeing the bodies of several people he knew. She couldn’t think what to say in reply.

  The combined bombs on Nanking Road and the Great World on Bloody Saturday were the most devastating aerial attacks on a civilian city to that date in history and registered the highest casualty toll yet on record.

  The Immediate Aftermath

  As the afternoon moved into evening, rainy squalls periodically dampened the city and murky dark clouds continued to hover. Shanghai’s hospitals were full to bursting. Workmen began converting several of the Settlement’s dancehalls and ballrooms into makeshift treatment centres. Many Chinese women arrived at these centres, in cheongsams and high heels, but prepared to roll bandages and dress wounds. Most Shang-hailanders were treated at the Country Hospital on the Great Western Road to the west of the city. Chinese found beds and treatment where they could; many more simply went home to be cared for. Facilities were stretched. The sanatorium of the Seventh Day Adventist Mission in the exposed Western External Roads, just beyond the Settlement’s boundaries, was evacuated. The sanatorium’s thirty-five staff and thirty-four patients were distributed around the Settlement’s increasingly overcrowded hospitals. The exclusive Columbia Country Club, with its swimming pool and rattan furniture where Shanghailanders had sipped cocktails only the day before, was rapidly converted into a military hospital.

  The Japanese response to the bombs on Nanking Road and the Great World was to launch a barrage of shells from the Idzumo directly into Chapei, starting numerous fires once again. They must have known that all the Settlement’s available ambulances and fire engines were attending the two devastated bombsites. Chapei was left without any help that Bloody Saturday evening.

  Map of the war front in Newcastle News, Saturday, 14 August 1937

  With all available police at the major bombsites, an orgy of looting began across Chapei, Hongkew and down towards Yangtzepoo. The skeleton crews of police left manning the Shanghai Municipal Police posts north of Soochow Creek were powerless to stop the plunder. Some households raised British and American flags in the hope that the looters would pass their properties by. Some displayed Nazi swastikas to indicate they were German households. This was a popular tactic for those Shanghailanders stuck behind the lines.

  American George Battey lived in the Kiangwan area, a scene of serious fighting between Japanese and Chinese troops and artillery. He hoisted a Stars and Stripes outside his house. Despite being six feet two inches tall, Battey clambered into his five-foot iron bathtub with a loaf of bread and a tin of salmon when the shooting started. Battey was an optimistic man, who had worked on Chinese newspapers since 1931 and tried to live a Chinese lifestyle away from the more westernised Settlement. He had rather outraged British Shanghailander opinion by writing a book on the abdication of Edward VIII that praised Wallis Simpson, herself a former Shanghai sojourner. Although bullets passed through the plaster walls of his house and pinged off his iron bathtub, he avidly maintained that both sides had avoided deliberately shooting at his house and his flag. But when the firing quietened in the evening, he pumped up the tyres on his bicycle, strapped his typewriter, shaving kit and some personal belongings to the back, and stuck Old Glory on a pole attached to the back wheel. He then rode four miles through the skirmishing soldiers in northern Shanghai to the American Consulate, cutting a rather bizarre figure clad only in a bathing costume and khaki shorts.

  Other Shanghailanders in the contested northern districts had their own stories to tell. Abijah Upson Fox, a well-known broker in the city for the New York firm of Swan, Culbertson & Fritz, was sitting in his apartment with his heavily pregnant wife Isabel. They had only been married eighteen months. A six-inch unexploded shell burst through the apartment’s window, shot across the room and landed next to Isabel. Abijah jumped up, ran to his wife, picked up the shell and threw it back out through the window into the garden, burning his hands badly in the process.

  The Chinese Red Cross, missionary societies and other charities were overwhelmed with lost and abandoned children separated from their parents in the chaos of the fighting and the exodus across Soochow Creek. It was reported that some Chinese parents were offering to sell their babies for as low as three shillings if they could be taken to a safe area.

  In Hongkew, Japanese residents in Little Tokyo formed militias. They claimed to be under attack from the Chinese, but the reality was that they were encouraged by the Japanese Army to randomly attack any Chinese civilians they found on the streets. They patrolled Hongkew armed with clubs that they were quick to use on any Chinese found on the streets. Fearing an aerial attack on Hongkew, the mobs smashed the streetlights to enforce their own blackout of the area.

  The Japanese general headquarters were based in Hongkew Park; their frontline was at Jukong Road to the north and along the North Szechuen Road to the south, close to Soochow Creek. Japanese armoured cars patrolled the North Szechuen Road. The Chinese crack Eighty-Seventh Division was headquartered in the recently completed modernist Civic Centre in Kiangwan, which was under constant fire and pockmarked with shell damage.

  The renewed Japanese bombardment of northern Shanghai was fuelled by mortar batteries in Hongkew Park, which illuminated the city as Saturday evening approached. Japanese Vice-Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa, Commander-in-Chief of all Japanese forces in Shanghai, issued a declaration stating, ‘The Japanese Navy is taking due action in view of the provocative actions of the Chinese.’

  They mainly targeted the area around the North Railway Station, but a direct hit on the facility of the British-owned Asiatic Petroleum Company, mid-way between the Settlement and Woosung, lit the sky bright orange before clouds of black smoke poured over the Settlement. The burned gasoline was estimated at a value of US$5 million.

  The Chinese Army continued to fight back, including the elite division that had been under Chiang Kai-shek’s personal command, the Eighty-Seventh, the German-trained Eighty-Eighth Central Division, as well as the Thirty-Sixth Division. Radio station X.H.M.A. reported that every train into the city was bringing more Chinese Nationalist troops. As night fell, the streets of northern Shanghai became eerily empty. People avoided the threat from Chinese and Japanese snipers duelling it out across the rooftops.

  Many Chinese died in northern Shanghai from ricochets, splinters and shrapnel. A renewed wave of Chinese refugees from Chapei turned into a tsunami – in cars, trucks, bicycles and with handcarts – approaching the Garden Bridge and the entrance onto the Bund and into the heart of the Settlement.

  Randall Gould had stayed put in his Broadway Mansions watchtower to observe the shelling of Chapei and the bombs that fell on the Settlement, reporting
all that he saw. Despite the chaos, he could see into the Settlement, down onto the Bund at the end of Nanking Road where the Cathay Hotel stood. He noticed that a growing flood of refugees was pouring out of Chapei, through Hongkew and attempting to cross the Garden Bridge into what they believed would be the safety of the Settlement. Moving quickly to catch the fading light of the day, Gould took his camera and snapped the refugees crowding across the Bridge and onto the Bund, capturing what would later become one of the most iconic photos of the summer war in Shanghai.

  Refugees fleeing Hongkew via the Garden bridge

  More refugees from Paoshan and the western part of Chapei attempted to cross into the Settlement further west along the creek, via the Markham Road Bridge guarded by the US Fourth Marines. In addition to the human tide that was flowing over the Garden Bridge, Soochow Creek was being blocked by hundreds of flimsy sampans, offering to ferry refugees, for a price, from the north bank to the south bank. Colonel Charles F.B. Price went along the creek on an inspection tour and ordered his Marines to spread out from Markham Road and line the entire three-mile long bank to control the flow of refugees along the waterway. Additional refugee centres were established in the Settlement and Frenchtown, though food shortages were immediately apparent. Most restaurants, cinemas, theatres and shops opted to close for the evening.

  Rhodes Farmer had finished his long day back at the Horse and Hounds bar at the Cathay and had to walk home as the city’s rickshaw pullers stayed indoors. He tramped back across the Settlement where hastily adapted garbage trucks, converted furniture wagons, dozens of Chinese handcarts and overworked ambulances passed him by. They were carrying the dead away. Near the racecourse, and not far from the Great World, Farmer took a short cut through one of Shanghai’s legion of narrow lilong laneways,

  It was pitch dark on one side; whitened by the moon on the other. On the darkened side hundreds of people lay outstretched. Poor devils of homeless refugees sleeping it out, I thought. Funny, though, that none of them were stirring! Then a streetlight showed me what they were: the unburied dead. My lungs were bursting and my clothes dripped sweat when I had finished running from that open-air morgue.

  Lucien Ovadia had stayed at the Cathay all evening trying to co-ordinate the clean-up operation and rescue effort. Despite appearances, the structural damage to the Cathay was relatively light, certainly compared to the devastation of the Palace Hotel across the street, which had taken a direct hit. Ovadia arranged with the manager Louis Suter, and his assistant Robert Telfer, to ensure the front of the hotel and its broken windows were boarded up. Workmen were hired to clean the façade of the hotel – remnants of the blast, including human blood and tissue, had smeared the building up as high as the fifth and sixth floors.

  Ovadia then arranged with the Chinese Company of the SVC to guard the neighbouring Sassoon Arcade and its many antique stores. Despite the damage to the front, all the hotel’s services, including its telephone system, hot water, restaurants and the Horse and Hounds bar were open again for business by the evening. Guests could still feel the crunch of broken glass beneath their shoes and had to avert their eyes from the blood on the street outside.

  Vanya Oakes had left the Great World blast site after the police, firemen and SVC units turned up. Walking towards Nanking Road she had seen trucks, laden with the dead, coming from the direction of the Cathay Hotel. She realised the other bombs had been in that vicinity. She found the last of the body count being cleared from the rubble along Nanking Road and the Bund while burnt-out cars had been shunted aside to make room for trucks and fire engines to get through. She clambered over debris to get into the lounge of the Palace Hotel where she had had coffee with her China Press colleagues just a few hours before.

  It was dark now and everything seemed closed, the street deserted. ‘. . . Against the walls of the hotel there were stacks of bodies, like sacks of wheat on a wharf. And – not one living soul in sight’.

  R. Somers spent most of the rest of the day at the Great World. He eventually took his engine back to the Central Fire Station. There he found most of his colleagues looking deathly tired and trying to type up their reports while the day’s events and horrific statistics were still fresh in their minds. He recalled that at intervals they would get up from their typewriters, go to the lavatory and vomit, then return and begin typing again. Somers’ father had been a surgeon, while he himself had attended many fires and seen his fair share of gruesome sights. He had long believed himself to be inured to the horrors of devastating blazes and deadly explosions. While he managed not to be sick he admitted that he had never before seen anything close to the terrible scenes he had witnessed that day on Thibet Road.

  A City Never the Same Again

  The last bomb seemed to have fallen that day, but people didn’t stop panicking. The reliable safety of the International Settlement, outfitted with its own police and soldiers to protect the enclaves, had been permanently shattered. Many residents wanted to leave.

  The Robert Dollar Line steamship President Taft was at anchor off the port awaiting permission to enter, while the President Hoover was just offshore, downriver at Woosung. Thousands of Shanghailanders crowded outside the Dollar Line offices on the Bund, trying to secure berths on ships that were already full and whose arrivals, let alone disembarkations, remained uncertain. The Dollar Line’s Shanghai manager, Oscar Steen, was able to stay in contact with the ships. When a CAF plane mistakenly dropped bombs near the civilian Hoover, the captains of all commercial shipping refused to come any further up the Whangpoo.

  A trickle of British residents began to arrive at the Shanghai Club on the Bund to register their wives and children for evacuation to Hong Kong on the P&O liner Rajputana. Sunday morning that trickle would become a flood. The American Consulate called on all American citizens north of Soochow Creek to evacuate the area. Randall Gould, still plane- and fire-spotting from the roof of Broadway Mansions on the northern bank of the creek finally had to come down from his watchtower when the building, home to many American and other Shanghailander families, was formally evacuated.

  Dogfights continued into the early evening between Chinese and Japanese planes. Around 5.15 p.m., just three-quarters of an hour after the fateful bombs on the Settlement, a squadron of Chinese planes wrestled with Japanese fighters over the far reaches of the French Concession to the west of the city. After some engagement, which fascinated Chinese and Shanghai-landers who stood and watched despite the danger, the faster Chinese planes sped off away from the city. Seven Chinese spectators were killed on the streets of Frenchtown by falling shrapnel. Chinese bombers made another run at the Idzumo, but managed only to destroy a sampan and the Chinese family it belonged to. Another bomb hit and destroyed the Jukong Wharf. The wharves and godowns along the Pootung shoreline were major targets. The recently built and very modern wharf of the Japanese steamship company N.Y.K. was partially destroyed by Chinese bombs, which also took ten Chinese lives.

  The French Concession authorities feared that a plane would spiral out of control and land on their streets. The Japanese claimed to have brought down one Chinese plane that had tried to bomb Japanese positions in Hongkew; it had crashed into the Japanese cemetery in north-eastern Shanghai. The Conseil Municipal that administered the French Concession announced a no-fly zone for either Chinese or Japanese planes over what they declared was French territory. Overnight French anti-aircraft batteries were mobilised to enforce the no-fly zone. Despite protests from both the Chinese and Japanese air forces, the zone was ultimately respected.