Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (9 page)

The results were predictable. Most of the bombs landed in the Huangpu, causing slender white geysers to rise towards the sky, seeming to almost freeze before collapsing back into the river and sending yellow tidal waves rolling towards the Bund. One stray bomb landed on land, hitting a Standard Oil gas tank, which exploded in a sea of flames. The pilots did score one hit against a Japanese target. A shell exploded a little further down the
river near the cable-laying vessel
Okinawa Maru,
whose crew was repairing an underwater telegraph line, sending shrapnel whistling across the deck and killing one sailor. However, the
Izumo
itself remained stoically in front of the Japanese Consulate, leading some to start mumbling that the old vessel must have a charmed life.

Despite the lack of success, spectators on the ground watched the show with intense interest. Some were refugees from the battlefields in the north of the city, while others were simply taking advantage of their day off to suck in a bit of real-life drama. Just south of Suzhou Creek, the roof of the Mission Building, where Rev. Rawlinson had spent the morning busy at work, was filled with more than a hundred onlookers, until C. L. Boynton, an official of the National Church Council, ordered them down. “I bought a good padlock and locked them off the roof,” he wrote.
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Elsewhere, there was no one to warn the crowd of the dangers, and the corner of the Bund and Nanjing Road, which offered a direct view of the
Izumo,
had attracted thousands.

Shortly after 4:00 p.m. yet another Chinese raid took place. The sortie consisted of ten aircraft, which, like all the others before them, dispersed as soon as the anti-aircraft guns began barking. The six planes in front vanished into the clouds, but the four in the rear maintained their formation. One of them suddenly veered off course, and moments later four bombs fell from its belly. Two broke through the surface of the Huangpu, but the other two were caught by the heavy typhoon wind and carried towards the riverbank. Thousands stared helplessly as the bombs, already put on their set course by fate, steered relentlessly for the tightly packed space at the eastern end of Nanjing Road.
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William Verhage, the young professor from Minnesota, watched the two bombs approach from a balcony on the fifth floor of the Palace Hotel, near the corner of Nanjing Road and the Bund. The members of his tour group had moved there from Astor House earlier in the day, after all foreigners had been ordered to evacuate the areas north of Suzhou Creek. He ducked back into his hotel room and fell flat on the floor, just in time before a large explosion made the entire building shiver. Seconds later, another loud blast erupted, this time even closer.
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Verhage found his way to the stairs and started groping his way down through a fog of dust. The main lobby was a scene of carnage. The first bomb had hit the Cathay Hotel across the street, blowing in the front door of Palace Hotel and shattering its large window panes, setting off a hail of glass shards. More than a dozen people were lying in pools of blood, injured or dying. The second bomb had crashed through the roof of the Palace Hotel and exploded on the top floor. “Chinese men, women and children were coming down from the roof,” Verhage recalled later. “Their faces were white with plaster, and blood was oozing out through the white.”

He immediately started looking for his tour guide, 30-year-old Robert Karl Reischauer, a brilliant political scientist from Princeton University. He went to the front of the hotel. Just outside, Nanjing Road was a scene of utter bloody chaos. The ground was littered with broken glass. Scattered everywhere were human remains—mostly nondescript lumps of flesh covered in tattered clothing. A new Lincoln Zephyr was engulfed in tall flames. However, there was no sign of Reischauer. Verhage turned around and headed to the reception. There he found the tour guide, one arm on the counter and the other over the shoulder of a wounded Chinese. His leg was a bloody mess. “Take me out of here,” Reischauer said calmly.

The two bombs released by the Chinese airplane had struck at exactly 4:27 p.m. The attacks stopped the arms of a clock at the entrance of Cathay Hotel, freezing in time the moment of the twin blasts. The shock waves and the debris had both taken a toll on the mass of people who had been crammed into the street. To Percy Finch, a foreign correspondent, it was as if a giant mower had pushed through the crowd, chewing it to bits. “Here was a headless man, there a baby’s foot, wearing its little red-silk shoe embroidered with fierce dragons,” he wrote. “One body, that of a young boy, was flattened high against a wall, to which it clung with ghastly adhesion.”
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A sickening stench of burnt flesh filled the air. As the wounded came to, they started moaning. Some were screaming. Part of the facade of the Palace Hotel had been blown away. On the fourth floor, a man clung desperately to the remains of the wall with one hand, waiting for help. It came too late, and he eventually let go, crashing through the glass awning of the hotel’s entrance before hitting the pavement. Others attempted to crawl to safety, scrambling with fumbling limbs over mangled bodies and slipping in the blood that covered the sidewalk.

Sascha Spunt, who had been married the day before and was on the way to a party celebrating his own wedding, jumped out of his car and helped the injured and dying. He was followed by his younger brother Georges, who watched as a truck pulled up. “Rescue workers started tossing in the mangled remains—half of a human torso, arms, legs, heads,” Georges wrote later. He tried to keep calm by reminding himself he had seen pieces of flesh before, on butchers’ wagons. Then he noticed a worker holding up a bleeding bundle. It was a disemboweled infant. Georges started sobbing uncontrollably.
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While the bombs exploded in Nanjing Road, police officer Jules le Rouzic was on duty at Mallet police station on 151 Avenue Edward VII inside the French Concession. From his guard booth near the entrance he had had a good view of everything that went on in the sky this afternoon. Shortly after the explosions on Nanjing Road, he noticed two airplanes approaching from Huangpu River and observed as one of them seemed to be losing height. Moments later, two heavy bombs detached themselves from the aircraft, disappearing out of sight behind nearby buildings. Then a cloud of thick smoke rose from the area around Avenue Edward Vll’s intersection with Boulevard de Montigny. Seconds later came a loud blast. Behind him, inside the office of the guard on duty, le Rouzic heard a voice shouting, “The Great World has been bombed!”
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The Great World Amusement Center was a six-story building dominated by a tower in the style of a wedding cake. In times of peace, it had offered a large variety of diversions ranging from fortune-telling to gambling, and from sex to removal of earwax. The menus of its small food stalls had included anything from dried fish to stewed intestines. A wide sample of the city’s population had milled around inside, and street performers and pickpockets had vied for space outside. After hostilities had broken out, the building had hastily been transformed into a makeshift shelter and distribution center for rice. The crowds were larger than ever. Now, however, they sought not entertainment, but mere survival.

On the afternoon of August 14, the throngs gathered around the amusement center were predominantly Chinese. Some were refugees from across the Garden Bridge, who had found temporary homes here on the
edge of the French Concession and the International Settlement. Others were simply curious onlookers and as was the case on the Bund, the main show was the drama in the sky. The sight of Chinese aircraft displaying the signature white star on a blue background was accompanied on the ground by triumphant giggling and pointed fingers.

The mood was excited once more at about 4:45 p.m. when two Chinese aircraft seemed about to make another run on the Japanese positions. Cheers and applause rose from the street. Then sharp-eyed individuals noticed two small dark dots drop from one of the planes—the same bombs that M. le Rouzic had seen.
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They fell with deadly haste, hitting the busy street before anyone had time to react, let alone escape. One left a huge crater near the traffic control tower in the middle of the road. The other exploded a few feet above the ground, causing shrapnel to fly over a large area.
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The explosions were so powerful that they killed a servant at the building of the Y.M.C.A., nearly 700 feet down Boulevard de Montigny.
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The casualties included several foreigners. On Avenue Edward VII, Rev. Rawlinson was dying in his wife’s arms, while his teenage daughter was watching. Just yards away two other Americans, Hubert Honigsberg and his wife, were killed in their car. It was the same type of carnage as in Nanjing Road, just larger. Death on the most massive scale was at the entrance of Great World Amusement Center, where the fatalities were piled five feet high.
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The victims—men, women and children—had been thrown up against the walls of the buildings. Many were stripped completely naked after the intense gas pressure from the bombs had torn off their clothes.
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“Any of you lose this?” a member of the Russian emigre community asked as he stood up from behind the dust-covered bar at the Cathay Hotel, where he had been sifting through the debris. He was holding a severed thumb in his hand.
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Outside on Nanjing Road, medical personnel were forced to prioritize among the injured, picking the ones most likely to survive. With grim faces they ignored the low-key mumblings and pleas of help from those destined to die. They needed all the help they could get from volunteers as they tried to disentangle bodies and save those still alive. For a brief period, nationality did not seem to matter. A Japanese girl in
high heels stepped carefully among the injured, alongside a Chinese nurse in a snow-white dress that gradually turned a deep scarlet.

The injured were carried into the first floor of the Palace Hotel. The bomb had destroyed the elevator and debris blocked the stairs, making it harder to reach the many who had been injured at the top of the building when the bomb broke through the roof. The hotel’s manager yelled for someone to call for an ambulance to help save six people who lay dying in rooms upstairs. It was in vain. Two disasters happening at the same time had stretched the city’s resources beyond the limit, and most ambulances were dispatched to the Great World. The foreign military forces were also slow to react. It was 35 minutes before a British armored car battalion arrived and gradually restored order to the street.
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With no help forthcoming, friends of Reischauer, the injured political scientist, decided to take matters into their own hands. One of them commandeered a motorcycle and asked an American marine who happened to be standing nearby to drive the bleeding scholar to the General Hospital, past Japanese sentries north of Suzhou Creek. Reischauer was fully conscious the whole time, and heard when a doctor said that he would have to amputate his leg. “All right,” Reischauer said. “I don’t mind . . . I don’t mind losing a leg.” The hospital staff cleaned his injuries and put him to bed. Shortly afterwards, he died. “He went easily,” said Verhage, “never suspecting I think that his life was at stake.”
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Back on Nanjing Road, Rhodes Farmer, the journalist with the
North China Daily News,
spotted one of his colleagues lying in the street, staring at the sky with vacant eyes. As he helped carry him into a waiting truck by grabbing his shoulders, the injured man’s guts spilled out. Despite the horrors surrounding him on all sides, Farmer’s professional instincts took over, and he walked around the scene to get details for a story. After seeing enough, he went to work at the newspaper. In the daily’s offices, the journalists were sitting at their typewriters all reporting the same event. They would finish part of their reports, head for the lavatory to vomit, and then return to finish their work.
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Evening was approaching, and firemen were hosing down the sidewalks outside the bombed-out hotels. The intellectual post mortem had already begun. Journalists and officials alike wanted to make sense of the tragedy. However, in the beginning much remained unclear. For starters,
the exact number of casualties was a matter of contention. Initial reports referred to as many as 5,000 killed and injured.
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As the months passed, the figure was gradually downgraded, and the most reliable figure, cited in an official report prepared by police in the French Concession, reported 150 dead at the hotels and 675 dead at Great World.

Even the lower numbers were horrific. R. Jobez, the vice chief of French police who signed off on the report, called it “a catastrophe without precedent in the history of the French Concession.”
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News of the disaster was reported around the world.
The New York Times
described a “terrific” slaughter.
Le Figaro
called it “a tragic day for Shanghai.” It had special resonance, because the German terror bombing of the village of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War had only taken place a few months earlier, in April. Now death was again raining from the sky, on a larger scale than ever. The era of airpower had arrived. No one could be truly safe any longer, no matter how far removed from the frontline.

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Claire Chennault had been in the air since the early hours of August 14. He had slept for only a few hours at his base in Nanjing before jumping into a lone, unarmed fighter to observe the Chinese air raid as a neutral. He had a good reason to be curious. The day’s attack was his brainchild. It was a mere coincidence. The previous night he had been at the Nanjing Military Academy in the company of Chiang Kai-shek and China’s First Lady, known abroad simply as Madame Chiang Kai-shek. “Madame,” as Chennault called her, had captivated the American warrior with her youthful charm and perfect English from the first time he met her. “She will always be a princess to me,” he had written in his diary.
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That night, as war approached, she had been in tears. “They are killing our people,” she had said, sobbing. “What will you do now?” Chennault had asked. “We will fight,” she had answered, throwing back her head proudly.
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