The Battle of
Shanghai, 1937
Thirteen years after Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into
Tokyo Bay, a nationalist rebellion overthrew the conservative Tokugawa
Shogunate, installed the Emperor Meiji in power, and implemented a program of
sweeping national reform. In an act no less stunning than the revolution
itself, nearly all of the former ruling families voluntarily surrendered their
power to the emperor, declaring, “We therefore reverently offer up all our
feudal possessions so that a uniform rule may prevail throughout the Empire.
Thus, the country will be able to rank equally with the other nations of the
world.”
By 1895, Japan achieved its goal. Japanese armies had seized
Korea and defeated China in the first Sino-Japanese war. Ten years later, Japan
sent shockwaves through the world when the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) sank or
destroyed most of the Imperial Russian Fleet in the two-day battle of Tsushima
(27–28 May 1905)—at the time the most significant naval action since Trafalgar.
Japan’s warships were newer with more modern guns and range-finders than those
of their Russian opponents. Whereas the Russians used wireless communication
sets produced in Germany, the IJN used sets that had been manufactured in
Japan.
To the Western powers, Japan’s meteoric rise to strategic
prominence in northeast Asia demonstrated that the Japanese were fundamentally
different from the Chinese, and, indeed, from all the peoples of the Far East.
John Pershing, who served as the U.S. military attaché in Tokyo during the
Russo-Japanese War, described the Japanese he saw as “a strong, virile,
aggressive race, with an ambition and determination that will carry them very
far in the contest of nations for power.”
Britain lost no time in securing an alliance with Imperial
Japan to contain Russian expansion, as well as to compensate for Britain’s
strategic dilemma of “imperial overstretch.” Under the terms of the original
1902 Anglo-Japanese Treaty, Japan agreed to secure British commercial and
territorial interests in the Far East, allowing Britain’s Royal Navy to
concentrate in the North Sea for its future war with Germany while Britain
recognized Japan’s de facto conquest of Korea. The treaty lapsed in 1923 after
the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty, but in the run-up to World War I,
the treaty placed Japan on the winning side, a position that rewarded Japan
with control of Germany’s Chinese and Pacific territories—lucrative gains for
Japan’s modest role in the war. Far more important, Japan gained Western
recognition as a great power.
For a nation that rose from obscurity to great power in less
than fifty years, the military triumphs over China and Russia were
intoxicating. When an incident occurred on the night of 7 July 1937 involving
Japanese and Chinese troops near the Lugou bridge, known internationally as the
Marco Polo bridge, the temptation for Tokyo to conquer yet again was too strong
to resist.
Major General Ishiwara Kanji, the dynamic Japanese army
officer who masterminded the Mukden Incident (the alleged Chinese bombing of a
Japanese railway) that wrested control of Manchuria away from Nationalist China
in 1931, was cautious. He urged restraint, telling the general staff of the
Kwantung Army, “If we act now against China, the sky will fall in. Let’s keep
the incident from developing further and have the local command settle the
issue.”
Concurrently, Emperor Hirohito approved the mobilization of
five Japanese divisions for a campaign against the Chinese that his minister of
war claimed “would be finished up within two to three months.” When Ishiwara
heard the news, he was more pessimistic. He told his colleagues, “We may find
ourselves with a full-scale war on our hands. The result would be the same sort
of disaster which overtook Napoleon in Spain—a slow sinking into the deepest
sort of bog.”
Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of Nationalist China, responded
by ordering the Chinese army to attack the Japanese garrison in Shanghai,
eventually sending 600,000 Nationalist Chinese troops to fight for the city of
3.3 million people, which in 1937 was the fifth largest port in the world and
Asia’s financial capital. Chiang was well aware that Shanghai was a city where
fabulously rich Chinese and European “colonials” lived like kings inside a
special “international zone” next to millions of impoverished Chinese. Under
the circumstances, Chiang decided to make the fight for Shanghai in Zhabei, the
poor, industrial section of the city on the north side of the international
zone, hoping to produce an incident that would rally the Europeans and
Americans to his side in the war with Japan.
For reasons that seem obtuse today, Japan’s military and
political leaders believed control of China, a nation torn by civil war with
hundreds of millions living in poverty, would add to Japan’s margin of victory
in future wars. Japan’s national military and political leaders equated
industrialization and access to markets and resources with the control of
territory and peoples.
UGAKI: PRELUDE TO WAR
The appearance of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” in
Japanese waters in 1853 forced the Japanese to face a disconcerting reality:
Japan’s military power and the economic strength to support itself were
inferior to those of the West. Without a rapid transformation into a modern
state, Japan itself might not survive contact with the West.
To modernize and catch up with the Western nations, Japan
embraced “raw, unbridled capitalism.” Japan may not have had Calvinism and the
Protestant culture that launched Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and
the United States on the economic fast track to prosperity and power, but Japan
possessed the time-honored values of integrity and hard work, as well as a
culturally and racially homogenous population with a deeply ingrained sense of
duty and a collective obligation in all aspects of life.
The same cultural values of energy and intelligence that
underpinned Japanese economic modernization also catapulted the Imperial
Japanese Army (IJA) into modernization. As always, revolutions in military
affairs involve much more than new technology. For a national military strategy
to be effective, its goals and tenets must align in harmony with the respective
nation’s cultural norms, geographic position, and economic potential.
In Japan, the ruling elites looked carefully at the various
ways in which other great powers sought to harmonize these factors—culture,
geography, and economy—within the framework of national military strategy.
Thus, the Japanese embraced the American model for industrialization, the
British model for ship-building and maritime power, and the German military
model for land power. But it was Japan’s embrace of Otto von Bismarck’s
Prussian-German concept of “rich country, strong military” that most profoundly
influenced Japanese thinking about national security.
In time, two competing strategic views emerged in Japanese
thinking about security and commercial trade, a continental approach and a
maritime approach. The continental IJA faction argued for Japanese expansion to
the “north,” through Korea and into Manchuria, Mongolia, and, eventually,
eastern Siberia. The maritime IJN faction urged expansion to the “south,” the
soft underbelly of Asia and the Pacific basin. In the first decades of the
twentieth century, the IJA overpowered the IJN. Eventually, the IJA drove Japan
into war first with China, then tsarist Russia.
In 1924, an important figure in Japanese military history,
General Ugaki Kazushige, stepped into the middle of this contest for the hearts
and minds of the Japanese people. Ugaki served as minister of war from 1924 to
1927 and again from 1929 to 1931. He lived and studied abroad, serving twice in
Germany as Japan’s military attaché, from 1902 to 1904 and again from 1906 to
1907. During this service, Ugaki developed a strong affinity for the German
people, their patriotic spirit, and their cultural values of integrity and hard
work. On completing his service in Germany, he envisioned Japan’s future
strategic cooperation with Germany “as a means to keep Russia down in case our
force will not be [strong] enough. I would rather prefer a Japanese-German
alliance than a Japanese-Chinese one. Suppressing Russia and China from two
sides, East Asia will come under our hegemony, Western Europe under Germany’s.”
Believing control of Manchuria and, if possible, eastern
Siberia was essential to Japan’s long-term security and prosperity, Ugaki made
a detailed examination of the massed Japanese bayonet charges and frontal
assaults against Russia’s fixed fortifications during the Russo-Japanese War.
He was repelled by the Japanese losses and found the Japanese generals’ callous
disregard for human life distasteful.
Ugaki also grasped the most important lesson of the
confrontation with Russia: Japan’s victory was more the result of Russian
incompetence and the inability of Russian forces to maneuver against the
Japanese than of Japanese superiority. General Kodama Gentaro, the IJA chief of
staff during the Russo-Japanese War, confirmed this insight, declaring, “This greatly
simplified matters for us. It also made the result of battle far greater than
we had anticipated.” Ugaki concluded that the views of many younger IJA
officers were correct. In the future, the IJA would need the mobility and
firepower to conduct sweeping flank attacks, enveloping or encircling the
Russian enemy.
When Imperial Japan was invited by President Woodrow Wilson
in 1918 to join the Western allies in a joint attack on the new Bolshevik
state, General Ugaki, now deputy chief of the Imperial General Staff, was
assigned to plan Japan’s military intervention. Ugaki welcomed the opportunity
and drafted the IJA’s plans for the seizure and occupation of eastern Siberia.
He saw intervention in Russia as an immense opportunity to reinvigorate Japan’s
northern strategy and expand its foothold on the Asian landmass. His
far-reaching plans utilized the railways all the way to Lake Baikal and
recommended their expanded use to move Japanese forces farther west if the
opportunity arose. However, in Russia, the IJA encountered a new Russian enemy
in the form of Bolshevik cavalry forces—mobile guerrilla armies that operated
over thousands of square miles, often under horrible weather conditions.
In four years of hard fighting, the Bolshevik armies scored
few military triumphs, but they did wear down the IJA and push Japan’s limited
industrial capacity and economy to the point of exhaustion, imparting a
strategic lesson Ugaki would not forget: Japan’s army and its supporting
scientific-industrial base were not prepared to meet the requirements of modern
warfare. Ugaki resolved to change this condition by infusing the Meiji-era IJA
with new thinking, a new organization, and new forms of armored mobility,
firepower, and aircraft. The question for Ugaki was how to finance and
implement his plan.
After the IJA’s four-year intervention in Siberia ended, the
politics of economic stringency confronted the army with a severely constrained
defense budget. A new internal debate raged regarding how, where, and against
whom to fight. Once again, Ugaki’s eyes fixed on Manchuria, not the Pacific,
and his relations with the admirals of the IJN quickly deteriorated. He viewed
Japan’s enormous investment in naval power as a diversion of resources the IJA
would need for the unavoidable collision that would decide Japan’s strategic
future: a land war with the Soviet Union.
As chief of staff, Ugaki embodied the fight for change
inside the Imperial Japanese Army, which was always intertwined with its
contest with the IJN for resources. Ugaki’s faction consisted of the so-called
revisionists, IJA officers who believed strongly that future wars would commit
the army to protracted conflicts against more advanced Soviet and Western
opponents, particularly the Western colonial powers in Asia. The revisionists
believed that modern armaments and new organizations for combat, not numbers or
morale, were the keys to victory in future warfare. Under Ugaki’s leadership,
the revisionist program reorganized the IJA into smaller, triangular (three-regiment)
divisions and introduced new technology in the form of tanks, mobile artillery,
and aircraft—all paid for with savings from an overall reduction in IJA
manpower.
On the other side of the debate were the IJA
traditionalists, officers convinced that numerically large conscript forces
could always compensate for deficiencies in weaponry and technology so long as
they were imbued with strong combat spirit. The traditionalists argued that
future wars would look like Japan’s first and brief war with China in 1898 or
the more intense Russo-Japanese War. Since Japanese troops were always
outnumbered by Bolshevik insurgent forces in Siberia, the traditionalists cited
the IJA experience in Siberia as evidence for the importance of numbers rather
than mobility and firepower. Major General Horike Kazumaro, who opposed Ugaki,
expressed the traditionalist view, asserting, “We made studies, but putting it
bluntly, Japan’s industrial capacity at that time could not carry out all these
things we’ve spoken of, like mechanization of the army, the development of
tanks, and the use of aircraft in group formations. If we overstrained in
trying to do it, it would have entailed a third and a fourth force reduction,
and the army would have been broken up.” Though the IJA’s share of the defense
budget fell from 18.8 percent in 1919 to 16.2 percent in 1922, the
traditionalists made sure the IJA grew smaller, but they also resisted change
in its organization, equipment, or thinking about warfare.
However, Ugaki’s fortunes changed in 1923, when his patron
and mentor Tanaka Giichi, now Japan’s prime minster, appointed Ugaki as
minister of defense. He was finally in a position to drag the IJA through a
second revolution in Japanese military affairs. The essential features of
Ugaki’s reform package were to:
Reduce the army budget. Reductions included the
disestablishment of four infantry divisions to offset the costs the Japanese
government incurred during the four-year Siberian intervention and the Great
Kanto earthquake, an approximately 7.9 magnitude quake that transformed Tokyo
into a blackened wasteland of death and destruction. Discharged officers were
sent to middle schools and high schools to become teachers.
Retire general officers opposing reforms. Ukagi removed the
IJA’s top eleven generals, prompting a Japanese journalist to record, “There
was no way to treat these stone heads other than to replace them.” Ugaki’s
allies were thus put into key positions in both the army general staff and
national command structure during 1925.
Change the force structure. Ugaki set forth his program to
reorganize Japanese divisions from square divisions into triangular divisions.
The square division was downsized by removing one regiment and skipping the
brigade as an intermediate level of command between regiment and division,
thereby achieving more savings in manpower without a loss of fighting power.
The smaller division retained the same number of supporting arms—artillery,
engineers, and related elements—leaving the formation just as effective, but
more mobile and less vulnerable to concentrated enemy fires.
Modernize the force. Ugaki secured a reduction in the IJA
budget to 12.4 percent in 1927 that partially funded the purchase and
eventually the development of new tanks, artillery, aircraft, and automatic
weapons for the IJA. He established the bureau of supplies and equipment to
supervise the IJA’s modernization.
In the two years after Ugaki left office in 1927, many of
his reforms were predictably delayed or halted entirely. Reactionaries in the
senior ranks of the IJA reasserted their influence to slow or halt Ugaki’s
efforts to modernize the army at the expense of the numbers of men serving in
the IJA. Simultaneously, interservice rivalry between the army and the navy
worsened, further poisoning the contest for resources and bureaucratic
dominance. In later years recalling the events of his two terms as minister of
war, Ugaki said, “I tried to seize the initiative, but the tendency of the army
was to go in the opposite direction.”
It would take another nine years for Major General Ishiwara
Kanji, another Germanophile in Japanese uniform, to push through Ugaki’s reform
program. In 1936, Ishiwara succeeded in persuading the IJA leadership to
complete Ugaki’s reforms by reorganizing all of the IJA’s divisions into
smaller triangular formations equipped with more modern weapons. The commitment
of resources and manpower to Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 postponed
Ishiwara’s implementation plan until 1940, too late for the IJA’s decisive
battle with the Soviet armed forces in 1939 at Nomonhan. Dismayed by Tokyo’s
rush to war with China, Ishiwara cabled the minister of war with the following
message concerning the decision to invade China proper: “Tell the Prime
Minister that in the two thousand years of our history no man will have done
more to destroy Japan than he has by his indecisiveness in this crisis.”
None of the IJA’s infantry divisions that fought in the
battle of Shanghai were reorganized until after 1940, long after the tactical
and operational advantages of the smaller, triangular division over the large,
unwieldy World War I square division were undeniable. Though Ugaki’s reforms
did not succeed in transforming the IJA divisions into smaller, more mobile
formations, Ugaki did succeed in equipping Japanese divisions for the battle of
Shanghai with twice the number of fighting men, three times the number of
rifles, and double the number of crew-served weapons (machine guns and mortars)
and artillery than were present in the Chinese divisions that opposed them.
Despite the setbacks to modernization, thanks to Ugaki, the IJA deployed two
tank brigades plus one additional tank battalion to fight in the battle. As it
turned out, the presence of just twenty-four tanks inside each Japanese
infantry division was decisive in the battle for Shanghai.
THE BATTLE BEGINS
Tokyo’s deliberate escalation of the dispute with China over
the Marco Polo bridge incident into full-scale war on 7 July 1937 hurled
Japan’s Kwantung Army into action. In mid-August, Japanese forces struck south
from Manchuria to seize Beijing and Chahar. General Chiang Kai-shek suddenly
confronted a difficult situation. Nationalist Chinese military strength in the
north was thin, and China was still weak from years of civil war between his
Nationalist forces and Mao Zedong’s Communists.
Confronted with a similar strategic dilemma in 1933, Chiang
opted to consolidate his strength in the south and concentrate China’s military
power against the Chinese Communist Party, at the time a much more serious
threat to Nationalist China than Japan. Under the terms of the Tanggu truce
that ended Japanese hostilities with China, the price paid for this temporary
retreat was humiliating but small. The humiliation entailed the formal
recognition of Japan’s conquest of Manchuria and the loss of Rehe, a portion of
Inner Mongolia controlled by China. Yet Manchuria and Mongolia were not
historically part of China, and the regions had few Chinese inhabitants. Chiang
chose to husband his resources and defend what he considered to be most
important: China’s core Han population. Shanghai was an entirely different
matter.
Chiang could play for time in the north, but Shanghai, only
forty miles from Nanjing, was the capital of Nationalist China, meaning it
could not be surrendered without a fight. In mid-July, Chiang ordered General
Zhang Zhizhong, a forty-two-year-old political confidant and commander of
Chinese forces in Shanghai and the 9th Nationalist Chinese Army Group, to
prepare his troops for an attack to drive the Japanese garrison out of
Shanghai.
Under the terms of the Tanggu truce that ended China’s
previous hostilities with Japan, a demilitarized buffer zone was established
between China and the city of Shanghai. The Chinese military presence in the
city was restricted to a Peace Preservation Corps, essentially a large
paramilitary police force, but Japan was allowed to maintain a military
garrison in Shanghai together with the French, British, and Germans. As soon as
war broke out in July, both sides began moving additional men and equipment
into Shanghai: the Chinese into the ranks of Shanghai’s Peace Preservation
Corps and the Japanese into their fortified Shanghai garrison.
Shanghai and Its Surroundings
The Japanese commander tasked with the mission of seizing
and securing Shanghai was sixty-year-old Matsui Iwane, a distinguished
Russo-Japanese War veteran of samurai heritage who had retired from active duty
just four years earlier in 1933. Matsui had served as IJA chief of intelligence
under Ugaki and supported his military reforms on the German military model.
Like many officers of his generation, Matsui believed
Japan’s mission was to liberate Asia from Western colonial rule. Early in his
military career, Matsui was strongly sympathetic to China’s nationalist movement.
In his younger years, he even befriended Sun Yat-sen, the leader of China’s
republican revolution who led the movement to overthrow China’s last emperor in
1911. In 1937, in a sad turn of events for Matsui, he was tasked to attack a
country he had once hoped to liberate.
On reporting for duty in Tokyo, Matsui was presented with a
new operational plan to invade and occupy northern China with nine to fourteen
divisions while three divisions seized Shanghai and two more divisions landed
in Hangzhou Bay, south of Shanghai. Once Shanghai was secured, the plan
directed Matsui to advance on Nanjing and compel the surrender of China’s
Nationalist government. In many ways, the plan was a Japanese version of Germany’s
Schlieffen plan from World War I, aimed at knocking out China quickly, then
turning north to refocus Japanese military power on the real threat to Japan:
the Soviet Union. Moving beyond Nanjing to secure China’s vast interior was
never mentioned or anticipated in the original plan.
Until General Matsui and the Shanghai Expeditionary Force
(SEF) arrived, the 3rd IJN Fleet under the command of fifty-four-year-old Rear
Admiral Hasegawa Kiyoshi would fight the Chinese on land, on sea, and in the
air. Hasegawa was a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War and had served on Admiral
Togo Heihachiro’s flagship, the battleship Mikasa, when the IJN destroyed
tsarist Russia’s fleet in the Straits of Tsushima. He also served as Japan’s
naval attaché in Washington and in 1945 provided the final report on the
condition of the IJN to Emperor Hirohito, persuading him to surrender.
For the IJA to succeed in its fight for Shanghai, Admiral
Hasegawa knew that Japanese positions ashore in the city of Shanghai must be
retained at all costs. On his own initiative, Hasegawa moved quickly to
reinforce the small Shanghai Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF)—literally,
Japanese sailors taken off ships, issued rifles, and used as infantry on land
with additional sailors. In the ten days before the IJA arrived, Hasegawa
expanded the SNLF to ten thousand sailors. They would provide an important
margin of victory in the battle by defending Japanese positions ashore against
the attacking Chinese Nationalist army until the IJA arrived.
Anticipating the decisive role that Japanese naval gunfire
and airpower would play, Hasegawa also requested additional naval power. Tokyo
responded by sending the 8th Cruiser Division and 1st Destroyer Squadron to
reinforce the fleet. By 11 August, Admiral Hasegawa had a fleet of thirty warships
in the 3rd IJN Fleet, including the 16th Destroyer and the 11th Battleship
divisions plus two aircraft carriers.
Three ships of the 11th Battleship Division were anchored in
Shanghai harbor to provide fire support to Japanese forces in the city. The rest
were located up and down the Yangtze River, where they operated without
interference from the Chinese. The Nationalist Chinese had a fleet of
fifty-nine ships and twelve patrol boats equipped with torpedoes designed for
riverine or coastal operations, but without the ability to mine the approaches
to Shanghai harbor and the Yangtze River, the vessels were of little use in
this battle.
Knowing that all of the IJN’s forces could not operate from
Shanghai harbor, Hasegawa directed the Kamoi, 1st Carrier Division, 1st
Combined Air Unit, 22nd Air Unit, and the 12th Sea Plane Division to set up
bases of operations in the vicinity of the Shengsi Islands some thirty
kilometers off the coast of Shanghai. These units added a total of thirty-eight
Type 96 attack/reconnaissance planes and twenty Type 95 fighters, all vastly
superior in range and striking power to China’s antiquated and numerically
inferior air force.
On paper, the Chinese National Revolutionary Army fielded a
force of 1.75 million soldiers. As is often the case in war, the numbers were
impressive but misleading. At most, perhaps 300,000 Chinese soldiers were
trained and organized in any meaningful way.
Chiang Kai-shek regarded the troops that his German advisers
trained as his best. Like the Japanese army officers, Chiang Kai-shek held the
German military in very high esteem. His closest military advisers were
Germans. One of the most famous, Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, travelled to
China and provided him with a white paper that was instrumental in persuading
Chiang to stand up an elite force of 80,000 men under German advisers. In
August 1937, these troops were better trained and equipped than the rest of the
Nationalist Chinese forces, but they were still in an early stage of development
and not ready to take on the IJA in pitched battle.
