Read Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze Online
Authors: Peter Harmsen
Tags: #HISTORY / Military / World War II
Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (44 page)
One German, at least, ended up with a story stranger than fiction. That was Robert Borchardt, the officer whose Jewish ancestry had put his officer career in limbo. Back in Germany, he left the army but wrote the bulk of an after-action report,
Die Schlacht bei Shanghai,
or
The Battle at Shanghai,
for the German High Command. In the meantime, his father had been interned in Dachau concentration camp, before being released and emigrating to the United Kingdom. But even though Robert Borchardt had been given good reasons to hate the Nazis, he ended up fighting harder for them than most.
When war broke out, he accepted an offer to return to the armed forces. Promoted to the rank of captain, he was involved in setting up Son
derverband 288, a unit that was to have operated in North Africa and the Middle East in an unconventional role similar to that of the Long Range Desert Group, the British commando force. The Sonderverband never came to fulfill its original purpose, but was attached to the Afrika Korps as a standard combat unit. Borchardt was put in charge of an armored recon-naissance company and received the Knight’s Cross in August 1941. This made him one of the highest decorated Germans of Jewish descent during the war. Later, he had a simple explanation for why he had fought for a regime that had murdered millions of people like him. “I served because I wanted to prove Hitler’s racial nonsense wrong,” he said. “I wanted to prove that people of Jewish descent were indeed brave and courageous soldiers.”
17
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Even if the Chinese did most of the suffering in and around Shanghai in 1937, the battle also turned out far costlier for the Japanese than any of the proud empire’s generals and admirals had foreseen. By November 8, the total number of Japanese military casualties in the battle was 9,115 dead and 31,257 injured.
18
The Japanese forces benefited from crushing superiority in artillery and air power, but this could not make up for the fact that the soldiers on the frontline had to pay the price for their superiors’ consistent arrogant underestimates of Chinese strength and will to fight. The dispatch of reinforcements happened in a piecemeal fashion, and Ma-tsui and the field commanders never felt they had quite enough men at their disposal to bring about a quick and decisive end to the campaign.
19
Nevertheless, as the battle for Shanghai approached its end, Matsui gained confidence that he had build up enough momentum to deal a blow to Chiang Kai-shek from which he would never recover. In an interview with a German reporter in late October, Matsui had said that after taking Shanghai the Japanese Army would march on to the political capital of Nanjing if necessary.
20
He was a man with keen political instincts, who knew that it was always better to ask forgiveness after the fact than seek permission before. “I never asked orders from my government,” he told a group of journalists. “Everything that is happening here is taking place under my entire responsibility.”
21
It is doubtful that the Japanese would have continued to Nanjing without an aggressive general like Matsui in charge. During the first days after
the fall of Shanghai, they merely pursued the retreating Chinese columns. This was a sound tactical move, and did not necessarily imply any wider-ranging strategic decision to go all the way to Nanjing. Yet, after the Japanese staged another surprise amphibious landing on November 13, this time on the south bank of the Yangtze River, it seemed there was very little shielding the Chinese Army from complete collapse. On November 15, Japanese commanders in the Shanghai area decided to head for Nanjing and bring an end to the war once and for all.
22
On its way to the Chinese capital, the Japanese divisions marched across a once-prosperous and densely populated area, whose silk products had once made their way to the markets of ancient Rome. They turned it into a deserted and blackened wasteland where the only living creatures were stray dogs “unnaturally fattened by feasting on human corpses.”
23
The soldiers routinely massacred whatever civilians they came across, sometimes as a form of entertainment after a long day on the road. On rare occasions when individual soldiers questioned the need for this harshness, the officers explained that it was retribution for fierce resistance offered by the Chinese Army.
Kurosu Tadanobu, a soldier of the 13th Japanese Division, described what happened when his artillery unit entered a village and set up camp for the night. “We’d take all the men behind the houses and kill them with bayonets and knives,” he said. “Then we’d lock up the women and children in a single house and rape them at night. I didn’t do that myself, but I think the other soldiers did quite a bit of raping. Then, before we left the next morning, we’d kill all the women and children, and to top it off, we’d set fire to the houses, so that even if anyone came back, they wouldn’t have a place to live.”
24
By December 1937, the Japanese Army arrived at Nanjing. Whatever prestige it might have won due to its military prowess in Shanghai and beyond, was completely erased by the ensuing orgy of rape and murder that seemed to have no end, but rather escalated as if the sight of blood whetted the Japanese appetite for more. Days turned into weeks. It became the infamous “Rape of Nanjing.” An unnamed foreign resident of the city described what life under Japanese occupation meant. “At noon a man was led to headquarters with head burned cinder black—eyes and ears gone, nose partly, a ghastly sight. I took him to the hospital in my car where he
died a few hours later. His story was that he was one of a gang of some hundred who had been tied together, then gasoline thrown over them and set afire.”
25
Robert O. Wilson, an American surgeon at Nanjing’s University Hospital, described the horrors he witnessed in a letter to his family dated December 18, 1937: “Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied. They bayoneted one little boy, killing him, and I spent an hour and a half this morning patching up another little boy of eight who [had] five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach.”
26
Matsui appears to have been horrified when he realized the extent of the atrocities committed by his troops. According to one report, he subsequently subjected his senior officers to a personal reprimand that surprised everyone in attendance by its severity.
27
It did not, however, save him from the gallows. He was sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and hanged in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison in December 1948. Tani Hisao, the bespectacled commander of the 6th Infantry Division, was sent back to China after the war to answer for crimes committed by his troops. He was executed in Nanjing in April 1947.
That was years into the future. In December 1937, as a young girl, Liliane Willens had only hazy ideas about what was going on in Nanjing. Kept in the dark by her concerned parents, she nevertheless saw the ghastly pictures in the local newspapers. The “Japanese dwarfs” were very, very bad, she was told by Old Amah, her Chinese nanny. Then the woman explained ominously how war had broken out in China every five years, first 1927, then 1932 and now 1937. In five more years, the Japanese would attack again, she said.
28
She was almost correct. Four years and one month after the last shot rang out in Shanghai, the first shot was fired over Pearl Harbor. Only then did China’s lonely struggle become a world war.
Names of commanders are given, in parentheses, down to division level for the Japanese side, and down to army level for the Chinese side. Please note that there was some organizational inconsistency in the deployment of Chinese forces in the Shanghai area. In principle, divisions were grouped into armies, which in turn were grouped into army groups. However, the army level was sometimes skipped, in which case the divisions went into battle under the direct command of the army group. As a result, in certain cases in the order of battle below, divisions are listed as placed on the same organizational level as armies. This is not meant to reflect any necessary equivalence between divisions and armies in terms of manpower strength or combat value.
JAPAN
______________________________________________________________________________________________
F
ORCES IN
S
HANGHAI
, A
UGUST 13, 1937
Third Fleet (Hasegawa Kiyoshi)
8th Cruiser Division (Nagumo Chuichi)
11th Gunboat Division (Tanimoto Umataro)
1st Torpedo Squadron
3rd Torpedo Squadron
Shanghai Special Naval Landing Force (Okawachi Denshichi)
J
APANESE REINFORCEMENTS, DISEMBARKING FROM
A
UGUST 23, 1937
Shanghai Expeditionary Force (Matsui Iwane)
3rd Division (Fujita Susumu)
5th Brigade
6th Regiment
68th Regiment
29th Brigade
18th Regiment
34th Regiment
11th Division (Yamamuro Monetake)
10th Brigade
12th Regiment
22nd Regiment
22nd Brigade
43rd Regiment
44th Regiment
J
APANESE REINFORCEMENTS, DISEMBARKING
FROM
S
EPTEMBER 22, 1937
Attached to Shanghai Expeditionary Force:
9th Division (Yoshizumi Ryosuke)
7th Brigade
7th Regiment
35th Regiment
18th Brigade
19th Regiment
36th Regiment
13th Division (Ogisu Ryuhei)
103rd Brigade
14th Regiment
65th Regiment
26th Brigade
116th Regiment
58th Regiment
101st Division (Ito Masaki)
101st Brigade
101st Regiment
149th Regiment
102nd Brigade
103rd Regiment
157th Regiment
Shigeto Detachment (Shigeto Chiaki)
J
APANESE REINFORCEMENTS, DISEMBARKING
FROM
N
OVEMBER 5, 1937
10th Army (Yanagawa Heisuke)
6th Division (Tani Hisao)
11th Brigade
36th Brigade
18th Division (Ushijima Sadao)
23th Brigade
35th Brigade
114th Division (Suematsu Shigeharu)
127th Brigade
128th Brigade
Kunizaki Detachment (5th Division’s 9th Brigade)
6 Heavy Artillery Brigade
CHINA
______________________________________________________________________________________________
C
HINESE
F
ORCES AS OF
S
EPTEMBER 6, 1937
Third War Zone (Feng Yuxiang)
8th Army Group (Zhang Fakui)
28th Army (Tao Guang)
62nd Division
55th Division
63rd Division
45th Independent Brigade
45th Independent Artillery Brigade
9th Army Group (Zhang Zhizhong)
Right Wing (Sun Yuanliang)
72nd Army (Sun Yuanliang)
88th Division
Peace Preservation Corps
Left Wing (Wang Jingjiu)
71st Army (Wang Jingjiu)
87th Division
78th Army (Song Xilian)
36th Division
61st Division
20th Independent Brigade
15th Army Group (Chen Cheng)
Right Wing (Hu Zongnan)
1st Army (Hu Zongnan)
1st Division
78th Division
8th Division
15th Division
16th Division
32nd Division
57th Division
77th Division
159th Division
Central Wing (Luo Zhuoying)
18th Army (Luo Zhuoying)
11th Division
67th Division
60th Division
54th Army (Huo Kuizhang)
14th Division
98th Division
4th Army (Wu Qiwei)
59th Division
90th Division
66th Learning Brigade
Left Wing (Liu Heding)
39th Army (Liu Heding)
56th Division
74th Army (Yu Jishi)
51st Division
6th Division
37th Independent Brigade
C
HINESE FORCES AS OF
O
CTOBER 2,1, 1937
Third War Zone. (Chiang Kai-shek, deputy commander: Gu Zhutong)
Right Wing (Zhang Fakui)
8th Army Group (Zhang Fakui)
28th Army (Tao Guang)
62nd Division
55th Division
63rd Division
45th Independent Brigade
2nd Independent Artillery Brigade
Artillery Learning Batallion
10th Army Group (Liu Jianxu)
45th Division
52nd Division
126th Division
37th Independent Brigade
11th Brigade (temporary)
12th Brigade (temporary)
13th Brigade (temporary)
Ningbo Defense Command
Central Wing (Zhu Shaoliang)
9th Army Group (Zhu Shaoliang)
8th Army (Huang Jie)
61st Division
Tax Police Division
71st Army (Wang Jingjiu)
87th Division
72nd Army (Sun Yuanliang)
88th Division
Peace Preservation Corps
78th Army (Song Xilian)
36th Division
3rd Division
18th Division
Songhu Defense Command
21st Army Group (Liao Lei)
1st Army (Hu Zongnan)
1st Division
78th Division
32nd Division
19th Division
26th Division
135th Division
171st Division
173rd Division
174th Division
176th Division
Left Wing (Chen Cheng)
15th Army Group (Luo Zhuoying)
76th Army (Tao Zhiyue)
16th Division
18th Army (Luo Zhuoying)
11th Division
67th Division
90th Division
15th Division
77th Division
39th Army (Liu Heding)
56th Division
74th Army ((Yu Jishi)
51st Division
58th Division
34th Independent Brigade
44th Division
60th Division
Jiangsu Peace Preservation Regiment
16th Artillery Regiment
Two artillery companies
19th Army Group (Xue Yue)
2nd Army (Li Yannian)
9th Division
20th Army (Yang Sen)
133rd Division
134th Division
25th Army (Wan Yaohuang)
13th Division
66th Army (Ye Zhao)
159th Division
160th Division
Learning Brigade regiment
69th Army (Yuan Zhaochang)
57th Division
R
EINFORCEMENTS LATE
O
CTOBER TO EARLY
N
OVEMBER 1937
Attached to 9th Army Group:
46th Division
154th Division
Attached to Right Wing:
67th Army (Wu Keren)
107th Division
108th Division
79th Division
Training Brigade
Attached to 15th Army Group:
98th Division
Attached to 19th Army Group:
54th Army (Huo Kuizhang)
14th Division
33rd Division
105th Division
Attached to 21st Army Group:
48th Army (Wei Yunsong)
170th Division
172nd Division
___________________________
Sources: Cao Jianlang,
Zhongguo Guomingdangjun jianshi, [A Brief History of the Chinese Nationalist Forces],
Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 2009;
Riben haijun zai Zhongguo zuozhan [The Japanese Navy’s War in China],
Tianjin: Tianjin shi zhengxia bianyi weiyuanhui, 1991.