Revolution and Civil War, episode 17
Not One More Inch
On the evening of 7 July 1937 Japanese troops open fire near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing, and this time Chiang Kai-shek decides that losing one more inch of land would be unpardonable. The episode follows Chiang from that choice and the new alliance with the Communists, whose army becomes the Eighth Route Army, to Shanghai, where he throws his best divisions into a three-month battle of street fighting and bombing, including the day his own pilots' bombs fall on the city's crowds, until a landing in his rear forces a retreat, and asks why he chose to fight at Shanghai. It leans entirely on scholars, with a little Chinese public voice from the war's first months.
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Transcript
Last time, at five in the morning on the twelfth of December 1936, soldiers of the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, stormed Chiang Kai-shek's lodgings at a hot spring outside Xi'an. They found him two hours later in the snowy hills, barefoot, shivering, and without his false teeth. Zhang demanded that Chiang stop the war on the Communists and lead the country against Japan. In the Communist base, Mao Zedong wanted Chiang put on trial as a traitor. In Moscow, Stalin wanted him alive, because a Chiang who fought Japan was worth more to him than a dead one. Chiang was freed on Christmas Day, to rejoicing across the country. And the Young Marshal flew back to Nanjing with him, was sentenced to ten years, and did not walk free again until 1990, at the age of eighty-nine. So the war between Chinese stopped. The war everyone could see coming had not yet begun. This time, it begins. And it begins with a bridge, a missing soldier, and a man writing in his diary on a mountain. Ten miles from Beijing stood the Marco Polo Bridge, already some eight hundred years old. It is a long, low bridge of grey stone on many arches, and its railings are lined with carved lions, hundreds of them, said to be no two alike. Beside it stood Wanping, a little walled town that guarded the crossing and the road and railway that ran south from the old capital. In July 1937, Japan had soldiers on that ground, and had had them there for decades. Under the treaty that ended the Boxer War in 1901, the foreign powers had won the right to keep troops along the railway from Beijing to the sea, and Japan had built that right into a garrison of its own. And for some years now, that garrison had had company. In September 1931, officers of Japan's army in the northeast blew up a stretch of their own railway outside Mukden, blamed the Chinese, and used the fighting they started to take the whole of Manchuria. Two staff officers, Kanji Ishiwara and Seishiro Itagaki, had planned it without the knowledge of the civilian government in Tokyo. Remember those names. Both will turn up again in this story, and not where you might expect. Within weeks the Japanese held an area the size of France and Germany combined. In 1933 Chiang's government signed a truce that made the northern part of Hebei, the province around Beijing, a demilitarised zone, and quietly handed Japan its control. In 1935 Japan squeezed again, and Chinese government troops and party offices were pulled out of Hebei altogether. The man left holding the line around Beijing was Song Zheyuan, a northern general who governed the region for Nanjing and lived in an uneasy, humiliating truce with the Japanese army. Song had come up in the old northwestern army of the warlord Feng Yuxiang, and his men, the 29th Army, were famous for carrying big two handed swords, which they had used in close fighting against the Japanese at the Great Wall in 1933. So when we come to that July night, picture a country that had been giving way, slice by slice, for years. That night, some 135 of the 5,000 to 7,000 Japanese troops in North China were out on manoeuvres near the bridge. That is a tiny force. Hold on to that, because what it set off was not tiny at all. They were practising a night attack, firing blank cartridges in the dark, when, by their officers' account, live rounds came at them from the direction of the Chinese lines. On the evening of the seventh, Japanese troops started firing in the area around Wanping. Then the local Japanese commander announced that one of his men had gone missing, and demanded to enter Wanping to search for him. The missing soldier, it turned out, came back to his unit unharmed not long afterwards. It did not matter. Demands like this had worked before. But this time Song's troops refused, and small skirmishes broke out around the town. Who fired the first shot? Three days later, Shanghai's leading British newspaper told its readers that who started the firing was still not clear. And honestly, nobody has settled it since. What matters far more is what each side decided to do next. On the ground, the local commanders tried to calm things down, and on the eleventh of July they signed a ceasefire on the spot. But in Tokyo, on that same day, the government of the new prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, announced that it was sending reinforcements to north China from Manchuria, from Korea and from Japan itself. Japan's generals were split. Some of them believed that one hard blow would bring China to its knees in a matter of months, and settle the China question for good. Others were not so sure. And one of the loudest voices for caution in Tokyo, that July, belonged to Kanji Ishiwara, the very man who had plotted the seizure of Manchuria. Now he was chief of operations on the army general staff, and he feared that a long war in China would leave Japan open to the Soviet Union. He lost the argument. Within weeks, what had been a garrison in north China was becoming a field army, division after division of it, and an incident at a bridge was becoming a war that nobody in Tokyo could call back. Chiang Kai-shek was the leader of the Nationalist government in Nanjing, and the commander of its army. He was nearly fifty, a soldier from a salt merchant's family in Zhejiang province, and, as it happens, he had learned his trade in Japan, at a military school in Tokyo, and served for a time in the Japanese army before the revolution of 1911. He knew his enemy. He also knew how far behind it his own army was. He was a hard, solitary, driven man. He rose before dawn, sat in silence to steady his mind, and drank no wine, no tea, only plain boiled water. He had promised the Soong family he would study Christianity when he married into it, became a Methodist in 1930, and read his Bible every day, beside the Confucian classics he had grown up on. He was proud and quick to fury, and he trusted very few people. But no one doubted that he meant to make China strong. For years he had kept a diary, every day, and it is through that diary that we can watch him make up his mind. When the news from the bridge reached him, he wrote that the dwarf bandits had attacked there. Dwarf bandits was a contemptuous Chinese name for the Japanese, and Chiang used it all through the war. In the same entry he wrote, "This is the time for the determination to fight." Although neither side knew it yet, the Second World War in Asia had begun. Today, beside the bridge at Wanping, stands China's national museum of the war against Japan. For Chinese, this is where it all starts.
Chiang was not in Nanjing that July. He was up on Lushan, a mountain high above the Yangtze in Jiangxi province. Lushan was a summer resort, cool green slopes dotted with stone villas that foreign missionaries had built to escape the heat of the river valley, and Chiang's government did a good part of its summer business there. On the tenth of July, three days after the shooting, Chiang wrote in his diary, "This is the turning point for existence or obliteration." That is a big thing to write about a skirmish at a country town. Why did he feel it so strongly? Because he had become convinced that Japan would not rest until the whole of China was its client. For six years he had taken the opposite road. When Japan seized Manchuria, he did not resist. The Communists, he said, were a disease of the heart, and the Japanese only a disease of the skin. Unite the country first, and fight the foreigner after. So he had all but recognised Japan's puppet state in Manchuria by 1933, and signed truce after truce to slow Japan down and win a little time. And all through those years, his own officers had muttered, and the newspapers had raged, that the Generalissimo would not fight. Generalissimo was the title Chiang's people used for him, the supreme commander of all China's armies. In December 1935, thousands of students had marched through the streets of Beijing to demand resistance, and the police turned fire hoses on them in the freezing cold. Within a couple of weeks students were marching in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Wuhan. Then came Xi'an, and his kidnapping, and the whole country cheered his release on Christmas Day. It was clear what that country wanted him to do with his freedom. Now there was no more room to give. Either he admitted that north China was lost, or he fought back. Not everyone around him saw it that way. Wang Jingwei was the grand old civilian of the Kuomintang, a hero of the revolution against the emperors who had once tried to blow up the regent of the last dynasty with a bomb, and for years Chiang's rival for the leadership of the party. For years he had also been the face of the government's deals with Japan, and an assassin's bullets in 1935 had nearly killed him for it. Now he advised Chiang not to escalate the conflict. Chiang's diary in those days is a man talking to himself. In one entry he wrote, "But only my wife agrees with me." His wife was Soong Mei-ling, educated in America, his voice to the English speaking world, and one of the very few people whose judgement he trusted without reserve. She was the youngest of the Soong sisters, a graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, quick, elegant and fiercely ambitious for her husband and for China. They had married in 1927, and they were a political partnership as much as a marriage. Then he went public. On the seventeenth of July he spoke to a gathering of the country's leading men, professors, editors and party chiefs, on Lushan. He set out what China could not give up: any settlement must leave its sovereignty whole, must leave the government of the north as it was, and must not remove a single official or move a single Chinese soldier because Japan demanded it. He did not pretend China was strong. "China is a weak country," he said, "and if, unfortunately, we should reach the limit of our endurance, then there remains only one thing to do". That one thing was to throw the last of the nation's strength into the struggle. And then the line people remembered. "If we allow one more inch of our territory to be lost, then we would be committing an unpardonable offense against our race." Not one more inch. After years of giving ground, the man who had given it was drawing a line. And notice what it cost him to say it. He knew better than anyone what his army could and could not do. He was promising a fight he thought China might lose, because he believed that not fighting would lose it for certain. On the nineteenth of July he wrote in his diary that he would not back down. This, he wrote, was "our very last remedy against the Japanese dwarfs." The speech went down well with a public that had been marching against Japan for years. The conference on the mountain was more cautious. It declared the Communist Party a legal body. But Chiang could not get the men in the room to agree to his proposed declaration of war. So China would fight without saying so. And as it happens, so would Japan. Japan never formally declared war on China, and China only did so in December 1941. In Tokyo they called it the China Incident, as if the largest war in Asia were a local misunderstanding. Calling it an incident had its uses. A war, declared, would have brought in America's neutrality laws, which barred selling arms or lending money to countries at war, and both sides needed what America sold. So for four and a half years, the biggest war on earth was, officially, not a war at all.
The war came fast in the north. Before July 1937 was out, Japanese troops took Beijing and Tianjin, the great city of the north and its port. Song Zheyuan's army pulled out to the south, and the old capital passed under Japanese control without a siege. By the end of the year Japan had set up a Chinese government of its own in Beijing, staffed by old officials of the warlord years who were willing to serve it. In Tianjin, Japanese planes bombed Nankai University, one of the best universities in China, and its buildings burned. Students and professors across the north packed what books they could carry and set out on foot and by train for the interior, where their universities would rebuild themselves in exile. The Japanese armies drove on. One column pushed south along the railway toward the Yellow River. Another turned west, up through the mountain passes toward Shanxi province, where the old governor Yan Xishan had run his own little state for a quarter of a century. In the pass at Nankou, north of Beijing, Chinese troops held the Japanese for weeks in August, and lost thousands of men doing it. In October, at Xinkou in Shanxi, Nationalist armies stood and fought a long battle while Communist guerrillas raided the Japanese supply lines behind them. For a few weeks in the autumn of 1937, the two old enemies really were fighting side by side. And Japanese planes began to bomb China's cities, Nanjing, Guangzhou and many more, week after week, from that summer on. Across the country, crowds sang a song from a film of 1935, the March of the Volunteers, which called on people who refused to be slaves to rise up and build a new great wall with their flesh and blood. It became the anthem of the resistance. Chiang answered with a phrase. He declared a single war of resistance to the end. It caught on, and Chinese still use it today to name the whole war. To the end meant what it said. Chiang left no road back. A British diplomat in China noticed something striking. Nobody in authority seemed able or willing to frame terms for an armistice or a peace with Japan. Whatever Chiang's own doubts, and he had them, the country now expected him to fight, and a leader who talked terms would have lost it. And the country answered him. In the cities, people gave money, food and blood for the soldiers. Students enlisted, or trained as nurses, or went out into the countryside to explain the war to villagers who had never seen a Japanese. Merchants who had grumbled for years about Nanjing's taxes bought its war bonds. For a few months in 1937, China was as united as it had been in living memory. It is worth saying now, at the start, what that phrase would cost. Over the next eight years, somewhere between fourteen and twenty million Chinese would die. Most of them were not soldiers. They were farmers and shopkeepers and children, killed by bombing, by famine, by massacre and by flight. Tens of millions more would leave their homes, walking west ahead of the Japanese armies with whatever they could carry. And the soldiers themselves went into it with almost nothing. China's army was large, well over a million men on paper, but most of it was poorly trained and poorly armed, loyal first to its own generals, and short of artillery, tanks and aircraft. Du Zhongyuan was a publisher and journalist from Manchuria, who had spent more than a year in a Chinese prison because his magazine printed an article that offended Japan. Nanjing had jailed him to keep the peace with Tokyo. That peace was over now. Du went to see wounded soldiers. They told him their side had no aircraft and no cannon, and when the enemy planes came over, all they could do was wait to die. And Du put the question for them. "Who are we fighting for? Who are we sacrificing for?" That question will follow us through the rest of this war. Chiang's answer, and the Communists' answer, would be very different.
Because there was another party at the table now. For ten years, since 1927, Chiang had made war on the Chinese Communist Party. In the end his armies had driven the Communists out of their bases in the south and sent them on the Long March to the dusty northwest, where they made their capital in a little town called Yan'an. Then the Japanese army in the north changed everything. Its pressure, even before the war broke out, forced the Nationalists and the Communists into a second united front, and that front saved the Communist Party from destruction. A united front, in the language of the day, meant an alliance between the Communists and another party against a common enemy. The first one, with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang in the 1920s, had ended in blood. The Xi'an kidnapping had started the talks. The Marco Polo Bridge finished them. On the thirteenth of July, six days after the fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge, Chiang received visitors whose arrival would have been unthinkable just a few months before. They were Communists. At their head was Zhou Enlai, the party's smooth, tireless negotiator, who had once run the political department of Chiang's own military academy at Whampoa. Zhou came from an old family of scholar officials, had studied in Japan and in France, and had a gift that both his friends and his enemies remarked on: he could make whoever sat across the table from him feel understood. Ten years earlier, Chiang's men had been hunting Zhou through the streets of Shanghai. Now he walked up the mountain to bargain with him. Chiang bargained hard, and in the end he gave way. He let the Communists keep their own military headquarters. Of everything he conceded, the most important by far was permission for the Communists to keep armed forces of their own. On the twenty-second of September the Communist Party published a declaration recognising the leading role of the Kuomintang. In it, the party promised to fight for Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People, to stop seizing the landlords' land, to abolish its own Soviet government, and to put its Red Army under the command of the national government. The Three Principles were Sun's creed for the Kuomintang: nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood. Every party in China claimed to honour them. The next day Chiang answered it in public, welcoming the Communists back into the national fold. On paper, the Communist area in the northwest became a border region of the republic, and the Red Army became a part of the national army. The Communists opened offices in the Nationalist cities, and before long they were publishing a daily newspaper of their own, legally, under Nationalist censorship. And in the south, the Communist guerrillas who had been left behind in the hills when the Long March began, scattered, hunted and half starved for three years, were gathered into a second army, the New Fourth Army, to fight the Japanese along the lower Yangtze. Now, it would be pleasant to say that two old enemies set aside their quarrel for the sake of the country. It would not be true. Neither Chiang nor Mao trusted the other, and neither of them really wanted a true united front. Mao's aim was to save his strength for the struggle with the Kuomintang that would come after the war, for the leadership of China. At a party meeting in a village called Luochuan in August, Mao made the case to his comrades. Some of them wanted to throw the Red Army into the great battles beside the Nationalists, for the sake of the nation. Mao wanted something else: an independent war, fought the Communists' own way, in the mountains and villages. He got it. And he had read Chiang's offer with a clear eye: the united front was not a marriage, it was a truce, and a truce could be used. And Chiang, in private, fumed at the Communists' "opportunism and cunning", and at their lack of "credibility and morality." So this was an alliance of rivals who each expected to fight the other once the Japanese were gone. Why did Chiang accept it? Because he needed every rifle in China pointed at Japan, and because the one great power willing to arm him, the Soviet Union, wanted the Communists inside the tent. But for the moment, as the conference on Lushan had declared that summer, the Communist Party was a legal body. The united front brought Chiang something else, from the man who had insisted on it. On the twenty-first of August 1937, China and the Soviet Union signed a pact of non-aggression, and soon Soviet aircraft, guns and volunteer pilots were on their way to China. For the first years of the war, the Soviet Union, not Britain or America, would be Chiang's biggest foreign supplier. The aid came on credit, and China paid it back in tea, wool and metals from its own mines. Stalin, you will remember, had wanted Chiang alive for exactly this.
Out in the northwest, Mao Zedong's soldiers got a new name. Once the party was legal, the Communist troops based in the northwest were renamed the Eighth Route Army, and organised in three divisions. Its commander was Zhu De, and his deputy was Peng Dehuai. Zhu De was older than Mao, a warlord officer in his youth who had given up opium and a comfortable life, gone to Germany to study, and come home a Communist. Zhu De had been with Mao since the first base in the mountains in 1928. Peng Dehuai was a blunt soldier from a poor peasant family in Hunan, Mao's own province, who had worked in a coal mine as a boy. The divisions were led by three men we will meet again. Lin Biao was a thin, nervous, brilliant young graduate of Whampoa, barely thirty. He Long had been a Nationalist general who led his troops into the Communist rising at Nanchang in 1927. And Liu Bocheng had lost an eye in battle in his youth, and was known as the one eyed dragon. When the war began, the Communist armies numbered some 30,000 men. The three divisions quickly grew to around 80,000. They wore the national army's uniforms, sewed the Nationalist sun on their caps, and drew a share of its pay. But they took their orders from Yan'an. Why insist on that? Because the Communists remembered 1927. In 1927 they had been left without an army of their own, and Chiang's purges had cut them down. They had no intention of letting that happen again. So Mao told his commanders to fight the Japanese his way: small units, behind the enemy's lines, in the countryside, never in the great set piece battles that would bleed them white. Where the Japanese armies passed, they held the railways and the towns. Behind them lay thousands of villages where nobody governed at all, and that was where Mao meant his people to go. Yan'an itself was changing. That autumn an American journalist's account of his months with Mao came out, and made the Chinese Communists famous around the world. And now that the party was legal, young people began to make their way there by the thousand, students and writers and teachers from the occupied cities, walking for weeks to reach the caves of the loess hills where, they had heard, the country's real fight was being organised. In late September, Lin Biao's division ambushed a Japanese column in the mountain pass of Pingxingguan in Shanxi, and the Communists had a victory to celebrate. The column belonged to a division commanded by Seishiro Itagaki, the other plotter of Mukden, and the ambush caught its transport in a narrow gorge. It was hailed across China as the first victory of the war, and the Communists told the story in their newspapers and posters for years. It was a small battle. But the Communists would make the most of it, and it came as the Nationalists were bleeding far worse somewhere else.
Because Chiang had chosen to fight his great battle not in the north at all, but at Shanghai. Think about the map for a moment. The Japanese were strongest in the north, where they had their bases, their railways and the open plains their tanks and guns loved. Shanghai lay at the other end of the country, at the mouth of China's great river, a few hours by rail from the capital. To fight there was to choose the ground yourself, instead of waiting for the enemy to choose it. Shanghai was China's largest city and its richest port, at the mouth of the Yangtze. In its heart lay the International Settlement and the French Concession, foreign run districts with their own police, where the Chinese army could not go. Over three million people lived there. It had the tallest buildings in Asia, the busiest port in China, banks and mills and dance halls, gangsters and missionaries, and a Japanese community of tens of thousands. North of them lay the Chinese districts, and the quarter called Hongkou, where most of the city's Japanese lived. The city had been fought over once already. In 1932 Japan had attacked it, and its bombers had flattened the Chinese district of Zhabei, sending 230,000 refugees into the International Settlement. The Japanese suffered 4,000 casualties then, the Chinese 14,000. But the Chinese had shown they could fight. After that war, the Japanese kept a naval landing force in their quarter, in a fortress of a headquarters made of concrete. On the ninth of August 1937, a Japanese marine officer and his driver were shot dead at the gate of a Chinese airfield on the edge of the city, and both sides poured men in. On the thirteenth of August, Chiang gave orders to his armies to defend Shanghai. He meant to show that China could resist and would, and he sent in his very best troops, the 87th and 88th Divisions. These were the pride of his army. Since the early 1930s a German military mission had been training a small core of Chinese divisions, and these were among them, in German style helmets. They carried German Mauser rifles and Czech machine guns, and for a few weeks in August 1937 they were the best soldiers China had ever put in the field. And the Germans' own man, von Falkenhausen, had advised Chiang that the crowded streets of a city were worse ground for the Japanese than the open plains of the north. Falkenhausen was a Prussian general of the old school, who had fought the First World War alongside the Turks, and he was now teaching Chinese officers how to beat the Japanese. Chiang ran the battle himself, from Nanjing and from his headquarters near the front, telephoning and telegraphing orders down to single divisions, over the heads of his generals, as he would all through the war. In his diary Chiang asked himself, "Are we gathering our forces for a decisive battle at Shanghai?" He was. And Japan met him. By early September, some 100,000 Japanese troops had been brought in, from north China and even from as far away as Taiwan. Japan's army had not wanted this battle. Its generals wanted to finish the job in the north, and it was the navy, with its marines besieged in Shanghai, that called for help. Once the troops began to arrive, the army found itself fighting the war Chiang had chosen, on the ground Chiang had chosen. The Japanese commander sent to take the city was Iwane Matsui, a general called back from retirement, who had spent years in China and liked to call himself a friend of the Chinese. Japanese warships in the Huangpu and off the mouth of the Yangtze joined in, and their heavy guns pounded the Chinese lines along the riverbanks day and night. The first days were fought in the air as much as on the ground. On the fourteenth of August, Chinese fighter pilots met Japanese bombers over Hangzhou and shot some of them down, and Taiwan still keeps that date as its air force day. The next day, Japanese navy bombers flew across the open sea, from Taiwan and from Japan's home islands, to bomb Nanjing and Hangzhou. It was a new kind of war, and Chinese cities would live under it for eight years. And on the ground, the Chinese threw themselves at the Japanese marines' headquarters in Hongkou, and broke against its concrete. Then the Japanese landed more troops north of the city, along the banks of the Yangtze, and the battle spread out into the flat country of creeks and villages there. Chinese soldiers called that ground the flesh and blood mill, and whole divisions went into it and did not come out. Units went into the line at full strength and came out days later with a fraction of their men. Some divisions were filled up with fresh recruits and sent back in again and again. Why Shanghai? Chiang had more than one reason, and they are worth hearing, because the choice would shape the whole war. His first aim was to drag Japanese troops away from north China, where the open plains suited their tanks and guns. His second was to make the world watch. A war in Shanghai, in front of the foreign concessions, would make every country angry at the enemy, and, he hoped, bring the United States and Britain in alongside the Soviet Union. And there was a third. Chiang used Shanghai as a test of his rivals, the regional militarists who still ran their own provinces, to see whether they would send their armies to fight for the nation. They did. In the last weeks of the battle, more than 200,000 Chinese soldiers from all over southern and central China fought at Shanghai. For a country that had spent decades split among rival generals, that was something new. The world did watch. At the end of August a Japanese raid hit the city's South Station, crowded with people trying to get out, and a Chinese newsreel cameraman filmed a baby, burned and alone, crying on the wrecked platform. That picture went around the world. Tens of millions saw it in magazines and cinemas. In October, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke of putting aggressor nations in quarantine, and in November the powers met at Brussels to discuss the war in China. The conference talked, and adjourned, and did nothing. The world watched Shanghai. The world was angry. The world stayed home. The Japanese paid too. By the time the battle was over, Japan had lost more than forty thousand men killed and wounded at Shanghai, far more than its generals had expected to spend on a city they thought would fall in weeks. Then the fighting itself. The Japanese tried to take the city street by street, and the fighting was savage, with massive bombing from the air to wear the defenders down. By October there was hand to hand fighting in the maze of streets between North Sichuan Road and Baoshan Road, in the north of the city. A foreign witness wrote of it, "No quarter was given and no dead were buried." Across the creek, in the International Settlement, the foreigners watched the battle from their rooftops, and the Chinese crowds who had fled there watched with them. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese had poured across the bridges into the foreign districts in the first days of the fighting, until the Settlement was choked with refugees sleeping in doorways, warehouses and on the pavements. One man who heard the guns felt something unexpected. Guo Moruo was a poet and historian who had spent ten years in exile in Japan. When the war began he slipped home in secret that summer, leaving his Japanese wife and their children behind. "When I heard the rumble of guns above Shanghai," he wrote, "I felt nothing but happiness." It sounds strange. But for a generation that had watched China give way to Japan for years, the sound of Chinese guns answering at last was a kind of joy. The joy had a price, and Chiang's officers could count it. Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi were generals from Guangxi in the far south, once Chiang's enemies in open war and now his commanders. As the losses mounted, they urged him to retreat. Chiang refused. "If we do not stand firm," he said, "how can we deter our enemy?" At the end of October the Japanese broke through at Dachang, north of the city, and the Chinese army fell back from the northern districts. One battalion of the 88th Division, under a young officer named Xie Jinyuan, stayed behind in a concrete warehouse on the bank of Suzhou Creek, facing the International Settlement across the water. For four days it held out, in full view of the foreign city, and a Chinese Girl Guide carried a national flag across to it, to fly from the roof. The papers called them the Eight Hundred Heroes, though there were only about four hundred. It was a gesture, and a brave one, and it was meant for exactly the audience that watched it. Chiang's wife went to the front too. On the twenty-third of October, as she sped to Shanghai to raise the troops' spirits, Japanese planes strafed her car and it overturned. She was knocked unconscious and broke a rib, and still she insisted on carrying on. In the first three months of the war, some 187,000 of Chiang's soldiers were killed or wounded. Among them were about 30,000 of the officers his German advisers had trained so painstakingly. Those men could not be replaced. Years of work went into the mud of Shanghai in a few weeks. Chiang had taken a great gamble at Shanghai. Was it worth it? He had shown China and the world that his government would fight, and he had pulled Japan into the long war it did not want. But he had paid for it with the heart of his army, and the army he fought with afterwards was never as good again. And at the very start of it, his own air force had shown the world how badly things could go.
To understand what happened on that first Saturday, you need to picture the river. Shanghai's waterfront, the Bund, a mile of banks, hotels and trading houses, faced the Huangpu River. In that river, off the Japanese quarter, lay a Japanese cruiser called the Izumo, the flagship of Japan's fleet in Chinese waters. The Izumo was an old armoured cruiser, a veteran of Japan's victory over the Russian fleet in 1905, and now it sat in the river in the middle of a city at war, firing its guns at the Chinese lines. China's air force was small, a few hundred planes bought from America and Italy, and many of its young pilots had been trained only in the last few years, by American and Italian instructors. On the fourteenth of August, the Nationalist command decided to knock out the Izumo, one of Japan's greatest naval assets in the city, by bombing it in the river. Chinese planes went in. The bombs from the planes at the rear fell far from the target, on the crowded city. Bombs fell on the Bund, among the great hotels and banks. Two others fell on Nanjing Road, Shanghai's busiest shopping street. Another pair fell at the Great World, a huge amusement hall where crowds of refugees from the fighting had gathered. The city's public health department kept a diary that day. Its entries come in gasps. "Palace Hotel hit!" Then, "many injured and dead in street!" And then a place: Nanjing Road, opposite the Cathay Hotel. The Cathay and the Palace were the grandest hotels in the city, facing each other at the corner where Nanjing Road meets the Bund. Among the dead was a young American scholar of Japan, Robert Reischauer, caught in the bombing by the two hotels. His younger brother Edwin would become one of America's leading experts on Japan, and later its ambassador in Tokyo. By the end of the day, over 1,000 people had been killed, Chinese and foreigners alike. Shanghai remembered it as Black Saturday. For the foreigners of Shanghai, it was the day the war stopped being something to watch from a rooftop. The grand hotels on the Bund had been hit, and there were bodies in the street outside. And the bombs that killed them were Chinese, falling on one of the busiest parts of the city, where thousands of people were out shopping on a hot August Saturday. And it cost the army more than lives. Chiang's forces lost the element of surprise. It was incompetence, plain and simple, and it could not have come at a worse moment for the Nationalists. Nobody knows quite why. Either a pilot misjudged his target, or the bomb release failed. Whatever the reason, they missed. Chiang had wanted the world to watch Shanghai. Almost at once, the world saw his own bombs fall on it. The battle went on regardless. The danger, in the end, came from a place nobody was watching.
South of Shanghai the coast opens into Hangzhou Bay, a wide, shallow inlet. From its northern shore, flat country of canals and rice fields runs north toward the back of the Chinese lines. Chiang had had troops guarding that shore. But as the battle for the city ground on, he pulled them away to defend Shanghai itself, and in doing so left the approach to the city wide open. It had happened before. In 1932, the Japanese had ended the last battle for Shanghai the same way, steaming up the Yangtze to land 10,000 troops at Liuhe, behind the Chinese lines. Chiang had warned his commander then to guard against exactly that, and the warning had not been heeded. Five years later, it was Chiang's own decision that left the door open. On the fifth of November, three Japanese divisions landed on the northern bank of Hangzhou Bay, forty miles south of Shanghai. Nobody opposed them. They belonged to a new army, the Tenth, made up largely of reservists and commanded by Heisuke Yanagawa, a general who, like Matsui, had been brought back from retirement. To Chinese soldiers with their faces toward the city, it could easily seem as if the whole Japanese army had come ashore behind them. It was a wild exaggeration. It did not need to be true. Now the Chinese armies in the city had an enemy in front of them and another coming up behind. The landing proved an important turning point, and it did much to win Japan the battle of Shanghai. Chinese commanders who had held their ground for weeks now found the roads behind them threatened, and an orderly withdrawal began to look impossible. Months of blood had held the Japanese in front of the city. A landing on an empty beach undid it in days.
Chiang had a choice to make, and he made it quietly. On the eighth of November, in secret, orders went out to his commanders to prepare to move their troops out of the city. He had decided to defeat Japan's plan for a quick war and a fast decision by fighting a long war of attrition, and wearing the enemy out. That idea, trading space for time, would be his strategy for the rest of the war. China was huge, and Japan could not hold it all. In plain words, let Japan take the coast and the cities if it must. Pull back into the vast interior, make every mile cost the enemy, and wait for Japan to wear itself out, or for the world to come in. It was a strategy that asked the Chinese people to bear almost everything. But nobody was told. The order was kept secret, and the papers reported instead that Chiang was offering direct negotiations between China and Japan to keep the crisis from deepening. On the tenth of November the government declared that the south city, the old Chinese quarter, would be defended to the death. Two days later, on the twelfth, the truth came out. The lone army in the south city had been ordered to retreat. In that same old city, a French Jesuit priest with one arm, Father Robert Jacquinot, had talked both armies into leaving a corner of it alone as a safety zone for refugees. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese sheltered there through the fall of the city. Remember that idea, a zone where civilians could be safe. Some foreigners upriver were about to try it again. And the foreign districts of the city, the International Settlement and the French Concession, were left as an island in a sea of Japanese occupation. The Chinese called them the solitary island, and so they would stay for four more years, crowded with refugees, spies and newspapers that said what they liked. Not everyone in Chiang's government took the retreat the same way. As the fighting worsened, Wang Jingwei had told Zhou Fohai, the deputy propaganda chief, that the government should not move so quickly to break with Japan. Zhou agreed with him. Now, as the armies fell back from Shanghai, Zhou wrote that "our fate has been decided", and asked, "Where will our burial places be?" Zhou had been one of the founders of the Communist Party long ago before turning to the Kuomintang, and his road, like Wang's, would end somewhere darker. Hold on to that, too. Some of the men around Chiang were beginning to think about how the war might end, and it was not with a victory. The retreat itself turned into a rout. Exhausted divisions streamed west along the roads and the railway, under Japanese planes, with the enemy close behind. Lines of bunkers that the Germans had helped to build between Shanghai and Nanjing were abandoned almost without a fight, by troops too broken to man them. On the Japanese side, the commanders on the spot did not wait for Tokyo. Their armies raced each other west, and Tokyo approved what they were already doing. In the towns along the road to Nanjing, Japanese soldiers who had lost friends by the thousand at Shanghai began to loot, burn and kill. Far to the north that same week, the Japanese took Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi. In four months, China had lost Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and much of the north. And so ended the battle of Shanghai, the first great battle of the war. It had cost Chiang the best of his army and the greatest city in China, and it had won him the world's sympathy and little more. At the end of that road, less than two hundred miles to the west, lay the capital, Nanjing. Not one more inch, Chiang had said. Now the inches were running out toward his own capital. Nanjing held his new ministries and, on the mountain above the city, the great tomb of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the republic. Before the month was out, the government announced that it would move its seat far up the Yangtze, to Chongqing, behind the gorges. But the capital itself still had to be held, or given up. Could he give it up without a fight? Could he hold it? He had chosen a long war. A long war meant giving up ground. But a capital is not just ground, and the man who had promised not one more inch was about to find out what it would cost to keep that promise. Next time: the man Chiang left behind to defend Nanjing, the handful of foreigners who stayed to shelter its people, and the seven weeks that followed.
Sources
- Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 297-299, 299-300, 300-301, 301-302, 312-313, 313-314, 314-315
- Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 91-93, 97-98, 98-100, 136-142, 143-145, 146-148, 148-149, 149-151
- Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 267-268, 268-270, 295-296, 305-306, 306-307, 365-366
- Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)