Bloody Saturday Page 6
In the northern districts of Shanghai, war raged on with ten thousand Japanese troops fighting thirty thousand defending Chinese soldiers. At 6.30 p.m. a lone Japanese seaplane flew up the Whangpoo from Woosung and circled the city against the twilight. A few minutes later a single CAF plane flew over the Settlement from Lunghwa in the west, heading towards the Whangpoo and the circling Japanese aircraft. As the Chinese plane approached the river, the Idzumo’s deafening anti-aircraft guns cracked the sky. Both planes retreated.
Artillery and field gun fire wracked Chapei throughout the night and extended into the neighbouring Chinese district of Paoshan, which was on fire. The Chinese command relocated from the North Railway Station to a hastily arranged bombproof shelter nearby. The penultimate news of the day was that two additional Japanese divisions were nearing the city and would enter northern Shanghai the following morning. The final news was a press release from the Shanghai Municipal Police stating that the bombs at the Cathay Hotel had killed five hundred and eighty-two civilians. The French gendarmes announced that the bombs at the Great World had killed four hundred and fifty people with a further seven hundred and fifty wounded. Both these initial estimates were to be woefully short of the tragic final count and would grow by the day as more bodies were recovered and others died. Herr Boss, the manager of the Palace Hotel, had finally managed to clamber through every room of the establishment. The death toll was sixty members of staff and fifty guests.
Bud Ekins and John Morris were back out covering the fighting in Chapei and Kiangwan during the night of 14 August, as they had done for the previous two days. It was a dangerous beat – not solely due to the threat of bombs and snipers. Their United Press colleague John Goodbody had been cornered in Hongkew by a group of angry Japanese soldiers and badly beaten. Ekins headed up to the North Railway Station shortly after 8 p.m., which was still in Chinese hands but under heavy shelling from Japanese forces. He had taken to wearing a surplus army tin helmet given the prodigious amount of sniping from Chinese soldiers and the resultant bursts of random gunfire the Japanese offered in return. It was a wise investment – a bullet pinged off his helmet leaving a severe dent.
Ekins noted that China was giving almost as good as it was getting – Chinese artillery destroyed the Japanese-owned Kung Dah Cotton Mills on Yangtzepoo’s Ping Liang Road and scored several direct hits on Hongkew’s Little Tokyo, including the Japanese Girl’s High School. They started fires in the densely packed, mostly Japanese-occupied houses. Ninety patients had to be evacuated from the American-run St. Luke’s Hospital in Hongkew, on the corner of Boone and Seward Roads. The patients were ferried across Soochow Creek to a makeshift clinic at St. John’s University in the far west of the city by Jessfield Park.
Arc lights were erected by Tonkinese Indo-Chinese French troops around the Great World. Elsewhere in the Concession the Conseil Municipal ordered a total blackout. Frenchtown, usually lit up with the floodlights of the Canidrome dog racing track and a couple of hundred neon lights and flashing store fronts along the Avenue Joffre, went completely dark. The French authorities, with help from the Chinese and International Red Cross as well as several troops of the Chinese Boy Scouts who had also volunteered, worked hard. One reporter noted that, by evening, the dead from the Great World explosions had been stacked seven feet deep on the pavement outside. Trucks were hastily converted for use as ambulances and hearses. There were shell craters twenty feet deep in Thibet Road and the bombs had fractured sewer and water mains, which made the rescue conditions atrocious. The Japanese ordered a blackout in all the territory they now controlled north of Soochow Creek.
Every hospital in the Settlement was full to bursting with wounded civilians. The city’s morgues were full to overcrowding. Many were identified, particularly the foreigners, but many, many Chinese, and a few Shang-hailanders, remained unidentified and unclaimed. Others had simply vanished. News of more dead Shanghailanders filtered out – a Russian woman called Mrs Belinsky; Rose Nashtevsky, a Russian telephonist; Mr E.S. Rim, an employee of the Municipal Council; Mr U.F. Lind, a Swedish dredge worker and ‘Dodo Dynamite’, an American barmaid whose real name was the decidedly less exciting Mrs Scott. The lists of the Chinese dead were so long they were reported simply as totals rather than as individuals.
Admiral Harry Yarnell had made swift progress in the ten thousand ton Augusta down the northern coast of China from Tsingtao and was in Shanghai by 8.40 p.m. Yarnell moored three miles upriver from the Settlement on the Whangpoo and prepared to meet with America’s Ambassador to China Nelson T. Johnson, who was driving towards the city from Nanking. Yarnell remained aboard and established a direct line of communication with America’s Consul General in Shanghai, an old China hand called Clarence Gauss who had first been posted to Shanghai in 1912. Aboard the Augusta, nine hundred Marines were on alert and ready to go ashore when commanded. Yarnell had ordered other ships in the Asiatic Fleet to proceed to Shanghai. When they arrived, and with the Fourth Marines already ashore, America would have three thousand troops with which to defend the Settlement if the Japanese moved to occupy the area. Additional French and British troops were disembarked from their respective ships on the Whangpoo, loaded into army trucks and dispersed to take up positions around the Settlement.
Weather conditions deteriorated once more as night fell. The city was lashed with heavy rain and winds which had the benefit at least of reducing the risk of further Japanese advancement into Chapei and Paoshan. During the day, a division of the SVC’s Russian Company had found itself isolated in its training camp and behind Japanese lines out at Alcock Road in the far eastern Yangtzepoo district. The men were ordered to evacuate the camp and begin a long five-day trek across the north of Shanghai through the nearby countryside to eventually re-enter the city in the far west of the Settlement. They were periodically caught in the crossfire between skirmishing Chinese and Japanese on their forced march and lost three men to sniper fire.
The American patrol vessel Sacramento arrived and moored up on the Whangpoo, just off the French Concession, with the express aim of guarding the Shanghai Power Company plant. Following the explosions at the Asiatic Petroleum Company facility, further explosions had been reported at both the American Socony-Vacuum Oil terminal and the Texaco terminal. The crew of the Sacramento spread a giant Stars and Stripes flag on the deck of the ship to ensure that there would be no mistaking the vessel for a combatant.
A few hours after the Augusta’s arrival, the Royal Navy’s HMS Cumberland reached Shanghai, the flagship of Britain’s China Squadron under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Little, who arrived himself shortly afterwards on HMS Falmouth. Two hundred British Marines were landed to bolster the nine hundred and fifty soldiers already in the Settlement. Another Royal Navy vessel, HMS Duncan, was steaming from Hong Kong with a battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and a contingent of the Ulster Rifles aboard – they were due to arrive on the 18th and quarters were being prepared for them. A squadron of newly arrived Italian Marines commandeered a school near the Quai de France.
The British organised a convoy of trucks to go down into Yangtzepoo and salvage the belongings of British residents left behind in the rush to evacuate. The British Consulate on the Bund, shaken badly by a falling bomb, had been forced to evacuate its building for the Metropole Hotel further into the Settlement. The diplomats awaited instructions from London as to whether to organise the wholesale evacuation of Shanghai’s eight thousand British residents. Admiral Little, who had witnessed the dreadful massacre of the Greeks at Smyrna fifteen years previously, advised a full evacuation; the British Embassy in Nanking was inclined to agree. However, calmer voices from the Shanghai Municipal Council dissuaded London of a full and immediate evacuation. Others felt differently – two hundred and fifty Scandinavian women and children did evacuate to Hong Kong. The British formally warned the Nanking government about the bombs that had fallen from Chinese planes close to HMS Cumberland. They were willing to accept it had been a mistake, but Nanking was cautioned to take greater care after the disastrous events of the day.
Claire Lee Chennault had flown down the Yangtze Valley from Nanking to Shanghai that Saturday morning, dodging ominous black rain clouds all the way. His flight had been severely delayed because of the bad weather. The pilot followed the Whangpoo River’s outline to land at the Lunghwa Aerodrome to the west of the Settlement. As his plane came in to land, Chennault could see the rolling farmlands of Pootung to the east and the imposing European-style Bund to the west. He also saw Chinese bombers making an attack run at a vessel on the river and the anti-aircraft guns blazing back from the decks of the battleship. Chennault was horrified to see that the vessel under attack was the British cruiser Cumberland with a huge Union Jack painted on its afterdeck. Chennault discovered upon landing just how disastrously wrong the day had gone.
The American Consulate was also waiting for a decision on full-scale evacuation from Washington – it would be a massive task and could mean moving up to four thousand people. The French cruiser Lamotte Picquet arrived and moored opposite the French Concession on the Pootung side, disgorging fifty French soldiers who marched to their barracks in the Concession; along the Quai de France opposite were moored a French cruiser, a destroyer and two sloops awaiting orders to evacuate French citizens from Shanghai. The German and Dutch Consulates also warned their nationals to be ready for possible full-scale evacuation. Captain Benson of the Royal Navy battle cruiser HMS Danae appealed to Admiral Hasegawa to move the Idzumo away from the Settlement to prevent any repeat of the day’s tragedies. Hasegawa refused. Eleanor B. Roosevelt wrote to Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye, asking him to withdraw his battleship from central Shanghai to minimise the risk of Chinese air raids. Konoye never replied.
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bsp; Harry Yarnell was still aboard the Augusta. He ordered the cruiser’s anti-aircraft guns to be made ready and to fire on any aircraft that seemed likely to repeat the bomb attacks on the Settlement. By now the Augusta had moved downriver. Crowds watched as it moored up on the Whangpoo and pointed its guns at the Japanese Consulate. The Augusta and the Sacramento had been joined by the Yangtze River patrol boat Tutuila and the oil tanker Ramapo. The Peary, a destroyer, was due to arrive at Shanghai in the early hours of the morning. Discussions were in place between Yarnell and Consul General Gauss on how best to move American citizens in Shanghai to Manila, should Washington order an evacuation.
Both the Cathay and the Palace Hotel evacuated and relocated all their remaining guests to other accommodation that evening. Shortly before doing so, a mob of frightened Japanese citizens clustered around the lobby of the Cathay demanding shelter, jostling with the Shanghai Municipal Police officers who were guarding the doors. Eventually, these refugees, and other homeless Chinese, were taken to Yangtzepoo Field in the far east of the Settlement where the Japanese were building an aerodrome and had several large hangars that had escaped destruction.
From Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek announced that he was launching a full enquiry into what had gone wrong, how Chinese planes had dropped Chinese bombs on Chinese people in a Chinese city. To the numerous rumours swirling around the bombings, Chiang added another: Japanese bullets had hit the bomb racks of the planes, releasing the projectiles prematurely. Madame Chiang took to the radio airwaves, in her impeccable English courtesy of her time at Wellesley College, and made the same claim.
Eleanor B. Roosevelt and her son Quentin had left the bombed out Cathay that afternoon unscathed and made their way immediately to the American Consulate where Consul General Gauss was in his office communicating with the American Embassy in Nanking, the State Department in Washington and Admiral Yarnell upriver on the Augusta. Gauss had been relieved to see that the Roosevelts were alive and well as Colonel Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Eleanor’s husband, has been threatening to fly out to Shanghai personally to find them. He immediately cabled the news to the President that his cousins were safe. Eleanor telegraphed Madame Chiang in Nanking that, ‘. . . as a sincere friend’, she hoped Madame and her husband would do all they could to avoid a repeat of the attacks. Later, when the sequence of events became clearer, she would follow up her first telegraph to Madame Chiang and wire,
None deplore more than we the terrible, tragic, accidental dropping of bombs from two damaged airplanes. I personally witnessed casualties and destruction among these people beyond realisation.
Madame Chiang replied to Eleanor,
The Generalissimo had ordered specifically that no bombs be dropped south of Soochow Creek. Our officers reported that anti-air gunnery wounded both pilots, and killed one on-board machine gunner, while also damaging the bomb racks, causing the bombs to be loosed. It is incredible that the belief exists that China deliberately bombed the International Settlement.
The American Consulate was a crowded place that evening. As well as the Roosevelts and numerous callers seeking news of relatives, colleagues and friends, the remainder of the deceased Dr Robert Reischauer’s party had been moved, with their luggage, from the Palace Hotel to the consulate. They were in a sombre mood having heard news of the death of their friend and leader. Eventually, it was arranged for them to be relocated to a French Concession hotel.
That night the Japanese struck back, bombing the Hungjao Aerodrome to the west of the city. The Chinese responded by scuttling additional ships to reinforce the barrier across the Whangpoo, while the evacuation of Kiangwan and Chapei continued. The numbers funnelling across the Garden Bridge onto the Bund and into the Settlement was swelled by a mass evacuation of Wayside. The Wayside District was located between Hongkew and Yangtzepoo, adjacent to the mostly Japanese-owned wharves on the river and the major target that was the Shanghai Water Works.
Associated Press reported that the city ‘. . . was stilled, out of horror over Saturday’s tragedy’. That night, usually the busiest of the week for the city’s countless bars, nightclubs, cabarets and restaurants, was eerily quiet apart from patrolling soldiers and the muted, cloth-shoe tread of the countless refugees who had crossed Soochow Creek looking for a doorway, an alleyway or some quiet corner to lie down in. The New Yorker’s Mickey Hahn was due to dine that evening with Chinese friends. Her host arrived, as did she, but he apologised that they would be dining alone. He explained the reduced party with nonchalance, saying, ‘So sorry the other guests will not be here. They were all badly wounded in Nanking Road.’ Dining in the restaurant at the top of the Park Hotel on the Bubbling Well Road, opposite the racecourse, Hahn saw Chapei burning. Only the Metropole Cinema went ahead with its new weekly movie programme and, without perhaps recognising the incongruousness of their choice, announced that they would be screening the Edward G. Robinson movie, Thunder in the City.
The Day After
Sunday, 15 August, 1937
On Sunday morning, Shanghai awoke to gusty winds and low hanging clouds; the faint glow of fires could be seen in the Settlement and Frenchtown, across to the north in Chapei, Paoshan and Kiangwan, as well as to the east across the vast Pootung marshlands, wharves and godowns on the right bank of the Whangpoo.
The typhoon hadn’t dissipated as fast as hoped for. Visibility was extremely low and the city prayed this would stop any repeat bombing runs from the air. Typhoon warning flags were re-hoisted across the city. Machinegun fire from the Chapei frontline could be heard and occasionally shells were fired from the Idzumo into the Chinese quarters. There had been periodic shelling of northern Shanghai since 2.30 a.m. The rain did little to dampen the fires in eastern Chapei, which were largely left untreated; concern mounted that fires could spread from wooden building to wooden building and reach still densely populated Hongkew. The city’s gas supplies were cut off by order of the Municipal Council to prevent conflagration if a mains pipe were to be hit by the constant shelling. Shortages were a concern and food prices had shot up by 40 per cent overnight.
Of more immediate concern was the need to clear the dead from the devastated portions of the Settlement and Frenchtown. It was to be a long and gruesome job, hampered by continual fighting and shelling to the north and the threat of more accidental bomb drops to the south, as well as petrol and manpower shortages. Some bodies, predominantly Chinese, were to remain uncollected for several more days, left to decompose on the streets.
The New York Times correspondent Hallet Abend arrived in the city from Nanking four days after the blasts. He visited the Cathay and walked from the Bund up Nanking Road as far as the Sincere and Wing-on Department Stores. The typhoon had completely passed by then and the temperatures had soared back to the mid-nineties with high humidity. Abend claimed the street still smelt like a ‘charnel house’ and that he saw human tissue and streaks of blood on billboards and buildings that were out of reach of the emergency crews.
On Sunday, further foreign troops poured into the city from arriving naval craft. The British and Americans had approximately two and a half thousand troops each to defend the Settlement, bolstered by seven hundred and fifty Italian Marines. In the French Concession the total troop deployment had reached four thousand, half of whom were Annamese troops from Indo-China.
Claire Lee Chennault was back in Nanking on the roof of the Nanking Metropole Hotel. Late Saturday evening, Japanese wireless stations had announced that Nanking would be bombed that same day. He was joined by several foreign newspapermen.
Chinese fighters patrolled the skies over the capital. After lunch, the city’s air raid siren system started to wail. The Imperial Japanese Air Force were confident and arrogant, expecting no effective defence by the CAF. Chennault had ordered the local airfield cleared and consequently, no planes on the ground were destroyed. After the disaster of the day before, the CAF made up somewhat for its errors by spectacularly fighting back and downing eight Japanese aircraft over the capital. In a further success for the CAF, they vigorously defended an attack on the Central Aviation School at Hangchow. Twelve Japanese Navy torpedo bombers took off from the aircraft carrier Kaga on the Whangpoo, flying towards Hangchow with the obvious intention of crippling the CAF’s main base. The CAF downed eleven of the Japanese bombers and crippled the twelfth.