German Advisors at Shanghai 1937

The situation was the culmination of a relationship that had
evolved over a period of several years. Germany had started playing a role in
China’s military modernization in the late 1920s, with initial contacts
facilitated by Chiang Kai-shek’s admiration for German efficiency. The German
government’s decision to abandon all extraterritorial privileges in 1921,
followed seven years later by the diplomatic recognition of Chiang’s
government, also created a benevolent atmosphere. In addition, as a result of
its defeat in the Great War, Germany was a relatively safe bet for China. It
was, in the 1920s and early 1930s at least, the only major power unable to
resume its imperialist policies of the years prior to 1914. Germany and China
were in fact in similar situations, Chiang once mused. “They were oppressed by
foreign powers,” he said, “and had to free themselves from those chains.”

Yet another factor behind the expanding Sino-German military
ties was the lack of suitable employment for officers in Weimar Germany, whose
military, the Reichswehr, was severely curtailed by the demands of the post-war
Versailles Treaty. The shadow existence they led at home contrasted starkly
with the prestige they enjoyed in China. By the mid-1930s, the Germans had a
status among the Chinese that no other westerners had ever experienced. When
Chiang met with his generals, his chief German advisor at the time, Hans von
Seeckt, would sit at his desk, giving the signal that the foreign officer’s
place in the hierarchy, while informal, was near the top. When Seeckt had to go
by train to a north Chinese sea resort for health reasons, he traveled in
Chiang’s personal saloon carriage and was saluted at every station by an
honorary formation.

Seeckt visited China the first time in 1933, and immediately
set about salvaging bilateral ties strained by German condescension towards the
Chinese. As the host nation and employer, China was to be shown respect, was
his order to the German officers stationed in the country, and being a
traditional German, he expected to be obeyed. When he arrived in China for his
second tour the year after, he was accompanied by Falkenhausen. No novice to
Asia, Falkenhausen hit it off with Chiang Kai-shek almost immediately. It
helped that both knew Japanese, the language of their soon-to-be enemy, and
could converse freely without having to go through aninterpreter. It was an
additional advantage that Falkenhausen’s wife was on superb terms with Madame
Chiang. Falkenhausen’s break came when Seekt, suffering from poor health,
returned to Germany in early 1935. From then on, he was the top German officer
inside China.

It is likely that Falkenhausen felt a deep sense of relief
to be posted abroad. His mission removed any immediate obligation to return to
Germany and work with the Nazis. “In the 30s we could have in good conscience
stayed in China,” one of Falkenhausen’s subordinates later rationalized. “China
was in much greater danger than Germany.” Falkenhausen had a very personal
reason to adopt that rationale. His younger brother, Hans Joachim von
Falkenhausen, a war veteran and a member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary
Sturm-Abteilung, was executed in a bloody showdown among rival factions inside
the party’s ranks in the summer of 1934. He was 36 when he died.

Falkenhausen’s unhappy relationship with Berlin’s new rulers
put him on one side of a political generation gap that divided most of the
German advisors in China. Among conservative officers of his age and
background, feelings about Hitler, a mere corporal in the Great War, ranged
from skepticism to adoration; in between was quiet acceptance of an overlap of
interests with Germany’s new Nazi rulers, who wanted rapid rearmament and the
creation of a vast new army. The younger German officers serving in China were
far less ambivalent. They were often ardent Nazis. The racist ideology the
young Germans brought with them from home may have contributed to lingering
tension with the Chinese. Since most of them expected to leave within no more
than a few years, virtually none bothered to change their lifestyles in order
to fit into their new surroundings. Rather, in the traditional way of Europeans
in Asia, they lived in their own enclave in Nanjing, a small piece of Germany
in the heart of China. If they paid any attention to local mores, it was with a
shrug of the shoulder. Brought up on austere Prussian ideals, they considered,
for example, the Chinese habit of elaborate banquets a costly waste of time and
resources.

The Chinese, too, looked at the foreign advisors in mild bewilderment. The German habit of wearing monocles was a cause of wonder and led them to ask why so many were near-sighted on only one eye. A few Chinese did not just puzzle at the behaviour of the strange foreigners, but had attitudes bordering on hostile. Zhang Fakui, for one, appears to have had a particularly delicate relationship with the German advisors. He did not trust them, did not share any secrets with them, and did not take any advice from them. “I had always had a bad impression of the Germans,” he told an interviewer decades later.

Falkenhausen’s own outlook underwent profound change. At the
time of his arrival, he had been somewhat indifferent to China, but he
gradually grew fonder of the country, and in the end he was very close to
accepting an offer of Chinese citizenship from Chiang. As time passed, he even
showed signs of divided loyalties between his old and new masters, ignoring
pleas from Germany to favor its weapon producers when carrying out arms
procurements abroad. Instead, he bought the arms he thought would serve China
best, regardless of where they had been manufactured. Finally, he developed a
high degree of resentment of the Japanese foe. “It is sheer mockery to see this
bestial machine pose as the vanguard of anti-Communism,” he wrote in a report
to Oskar Trautmann, the German ambassador in Nanjing.

Once war broke out, Falkenhausen was in favor of an
aggressive and all-encompassing strategy against the enemy. He advised that the
Japanese garrison in Shanghai be attacked and wiped out, regardless of the fact
that it was located inside the International Settlement. He even urged air
attacks on western Korea and sabotage on the Japanese home islands. These steps
went much further than almost any of his Chinese hosts was prepared to go.
Perhaps they feared setting a task for themselves that they could not handle.
Falkenhausen, on the other hand, never seemed to have harbored any serious
doubts about China’s military prowess. Rather, its army’s willingness to make
sacrifices appealed to his special German passion for absolutes. “The morale of
the Chinese Army is high. It will fight back stubbornly,” he said. “It will be
a struggle to the last extreme.”

#

Baba Toraji, a 21-year-old employee of the exclusive
department store Mag-asin Franco-Japonais, was growing more nervous for every
minute that passed on the morning of August 18. A younger colleague of his,
fellow Japanese Sakanichi Takaichi, had left earlier to buy bread for his colleagues,
and he had not returned. In the end, Baba decided to go looking himself. It did
not take long before he found Sakanichi, caught up in a Chinese crowd that had
identified him as Japanese. Both men were mauled severely and left on the
street. Baba was pronounced dead by the time medical personnel arrived. His
younger colleague was sent to hospital with serious injuries.

Earlier in the month, a group of eight Japanese had unwisely
shown up on the Bund, trying to push their way through a dense crowd. Jeers
started. Someone picked up a discarded shoe and threw it at them. The Japanese
broke into a run, and seven managed to escape. A huge brick went sailing
through the air and hit the eighth in the back. He fell to the ground, and the
mob was upon him. “Men could be seen jumping in the air to land with both feet
on the unfortunate man’s body,” the North China Daily News reported. “Others,
with stick and bricks that seemed to come from nowhere, belabored him from head
to foot.” He was eventually rescued and hospitalized in a critical condition.

Being Japanese in Shanghai in August 1937 was dangerous. By
contrast, Shanghai’s western residents only came into contact with the horrors
around them in an indirect fashion. They watched the dense black smoke rising
over Hongkou, and they saw the flotsam drifting down Suzhou Creek—cows,
buffaloes, and a steady stream of uniformed corpses. The debris of war served
as a warning that the battle was escalating and could soon engulf the foreign
enclaves. It was time for the women and children to leave. A total of 1,300
British and American evacuees departed from Shanghai on August 17. The British
left for Hong Kong on the Rajputana, while the Americans boarded the President
Jefferson for Manila. On August 19, 1,400 more British citizens, mostly women
and children, sailed on destroyers to board the Empress of Asia at Wusong.50
This was part of a scheme to evacuate a total of 3,000 British nationals,
including 85 percent of the women and children in the city.

Staying on the fringe of a great battle, as the foreigners
did, made life more dangerous. Even so, they were not deliberately targeted,
and that made them the envy of the Chinese population. Shanghai shops saw brisk
sales of the national flags of major non-belligerent nations, as Chinese
residents hung them at their doorways in the hope that the sight of a Union
Jack or the Stars and Stripes would ward off enemy fire, very much in the
fashion that the images of guardian deities kept traditional Chinese homes safe
from evil spirits. However, few had faith that anything they could do would
make a difference, except running away. Desperate crowds, many uprooted from
their homes in the north of the city, gathered in the International Settlement,
clamoring for food. Looting soon became widespread. Crowds attacked trucks
transporting rice, or smashed their way to shop supplies. The authorities were
merciless in tackling the problem. On at least one occasion, French police
opened fire on a crowd that had attacked a food hawker. Law enforcers in the
International Settlement handed over dozens of looters to the Chinese police,
knowing perfectly well they would be shot within hours.

Violence in many forms, often lethal, was meted out in
liberal doses among the Chinese. An atmosphere of intense suspicion permeated
the city, and everyone was a potential traitor. On the first day of fighting,
six Chinese nationals were executed. All were sentenced to death for spying on
behalf of the Japanese or for carrying out acts of sabotage in Zhabei and other
areas under the control of the Shanghai municipal government. On another
occasion, two women and seven men were decapitated for working for the
Japanese. Their heads were placed on top of poles and put on display in the
market square, as thousands of men, women and children watched with glee.

Following rumors published in the local press that the
Japanese had bribed collaborators to poison the water supply, gangs armed with
clubs and other primitive weapons raged through the streets, stopping
suspicious-looking individuals. Anyone caught with a powdery substance, even
medicine, was severely beaten. Fifteen innocent Chinese were killed and 40
injured that way, according to police. Even having the wrong appearance could
be deadly. On the morning of August 17, an unregistered Portuguese man was
beaten to death by a mob because he was thought to look Japanese. A Sikh police
officer who came to his rescue was in turn badly mangled by the crowd.

One group of Shanghai residents was particularly unfortunate
and unable to go anywhere, despite being directly in the middle of some of the
worst fighting. They were the inmates of Ward Road Jail, Shanghai’s largest
prison, located in Yangshupu. Thousands of them, along with their wardens, were
trapped when the battle started. On the morning of August 17, a shell struck
the prison, killing ten people and causing extensive damage to both the cells
and the prison staff’s quarters. In the days that followed, the prison suffered
several direct hits when Chinese artillery in Pudong or at the North Railway
Station misfired.

By August 20, the penal authorities began evacuating the
prisoners, starting with the criminally insane, who would pose the greatest
danger if a chance grenade were to make escape possible. On August 22, a more
comprehensive evacuation was planned to take place, but buses meant to bring
150 juvenile criminals to the Chinese district via the International Settlement
were stopped by Japanese guards at the Garden Bridge. The juveniles were young
and could be recruited for the Chinese war effort and they were returned to
their prison. From then on, the evacuation drive nearly stopped, and weeks
later, the Ward Road facility was still brimming with inmates, exposed to the
deadly fire from both sides.

#

The Japanese marine units dispatched from Manchuria on
August 16, the day of crisis for their compatriots in Shanghai, arrived in the
city during the morning of August 18 and were immediately thrown into the
battle. A few hours later, the Japanese Cabinet announced the formal end of a
policy of non-expansion in China, which by that time had been a hollow shell
for several weeks anyway. “The empire, having reached the limit of its
patience, has been forced to take resolute measures,” it said. “Henceforth it
will punish the outrages of the Chinese Army, and thus spur the (Chinese)
government to self-reflect.”

On the same day, the British charge d’affaires in Tokyo,
James Dodds, suggested a peace proposal to Japanese Deputy Foreign Affairs
Minister Horinouchi Kensuke. The proposal, drafted two days earlier by the
British, American and French ambassadors to Nanjing, called for the
transformation of Shanghai into a neutral zone based on a commitment by both
China and Japan to withdraw their forces from the city. Japan was not excited
about the idea, and on August 19, Horinouchi presented the British diplomat
with his government’s official refusal, stating that China would have to
retreat to the boundaries outlined in the truce that ended hostilities in 1932.
Japan was gaining confidence.

Meanwhile, there was a growing feeling on the Chinese side
that important opportunities had been missed. On August 18, Chiang Kai-shek
dispatched Deputy War Minister Chen Cheng, one of his main military aides, to
the Shanghai front in order to confer with Zhang Zhizhong about how to carry
the battle forward. The two generals reached the conclusion that rather than
focusing the attacks on the heavily fortified Hongkou area, they should turn
their attention to the Yangshupu district, seeking to push through to the
Huangpu River and cut the Japanese forces in two. This was the decision the
German advisers and the frontline commanders had been waiting for. The gloves
had come off, and the self-defeating reluctance to attack Japanese troops
inside the settlement borders was gone.

As the forces that had been in Shanghai since the start of
hostilities were beginning to show signs of attrition, the generals decided to
place the main responsibility for the attack with the 36th Infantry Division,
which had only just arrived, and was being moved to the eastern side of the
Hongkou salient. It was an obvious choice, as its soldiers were from the same
German-trained elite as those of the 87th and 88th Divisions. Two of the
division’s four regiments were ordered to attack straight south in the
direction of the Huangpu, down streets running perpendicular to the river. In
order to reach the wharf area, the soldiers would have to pass five heavily
defended intersections. Severe casualties were expected.

The two regiments launched the attack almost immediately,
moving out in the early hours of August 19. Sabotage and incendiary bombs
resulted in a number of large fires that helped improve visibility during the
night fighting. However, the intersections proved a problem. The Chinese soldiers,
most of whom were seeing battle for the first time, became defenseless prey to
Japanese infantry posted on the rooftops or in windows on the upper floors of
buildings along their route. In the absence of any other cover, they often had
to duck behind the bodies of those already killed. Even so, for a brief period
of time, the Chinese believed they had finally managed to break the back of the
hated Japanese. “I thought we could push the enemy into the river and chase
them out of Shanghai,” said Zhang Fakui, watching the battle from the other
side of the Huangpu.

Once they had reached Broadway, the last street running
parallel with the Huangpu River, they faced the most formidable obstacle of
them all. The Japanese defenders had taken up positions on top of high walls
protecting the wharfs. Dislodging them was akin to storming a medieval castle.
A large steel gate formed an entrance into the wharves, but it yielded to no
weapon that the Chinese had brought; even the 150mm howitzers could not destroy
it. Officers and soldiers tried to scale the gate, but were mowed down by
enfilading Japanese machine gun fire. Also located near the river were
Japanese-owned factories, many of which had been turned into veritable
fortresses. One example was the Gong Da Cotton Mill at the eastern edge of the
International Settlement. Again, the Chinese attackers did not possess weaponry
powerful enough to penetrate the Japanese defenses there.

While the Chinese were short of large-caliber guns, the
Japanese had plenty aboard the Third Fleet anchored in the Huangpu. The 36th
Infantry Division was subjected to merciless bombardment, which threw several
of its units into disarray. The following night, between August 19 and 20, the
88th Infantry Division for the first time showed that its ability to wage war
had been so severely compromised it was, temporarily at least, unable to carry
out meaningful offensive action. When ordered to attack, it moved in a belated
and reluctant fashion, and got nowhere. While the Chinese were getting weaker,
the Japanese were growing stronger. The marines dispatched from Sasebo arrived
in Shanghai on that same night, boosting the number of marines inside the garrison
to 6,300 well-armed men.

Despite a propensity to husband expensive equipment, the
Chinese decided at this point to throw major parts of their new tank force into
the battle. As was the case with the German-trained divisions and the air
force, this was another key asset that had taken years to build up. Following
the 1932 incident, when Japan had used its armor to some effect, the
Nationalist government had decided to acquire its own tank arm, purchasing
tanks from a variety of European nations, including Germany, Britain and Italy.
As a result of these efforts, by the outbreak of hostilities in 1937, China was
able to deploy the British-built, 6-ton, single-turret Vickers model in
Shanghai.

The 87th Infantry Division was given disposal of two armored
companies, and it lost everything. Some of the tanks had just arrived from
Nanjing, and their crews had not had any time to undertake training in
coordinated attacks, or even simply to establish rapport with the local troops.
As a result, the tank companies were mostly left to their own devices without
infantry support. The Chinese also often neglected to seal off adjacent streets
when deploying their tanks, allowing Japanese armor to outflank them and knock
them out. To be sure, the Japanese, too, lacked experience in coordination
between armor and infantry and frequently saw their tanks annihilated by
Chinese anti-tank weapons.

On August 20, Zhang Zhizhong was inspecting the Yangshupu
front when he met one of his former students from the Central Military Academy,
who was in charge of a tank company that was about to attack the wharves. Some
of the tanks under his command had been under repair and hastily pulled out of
the workshop. “The vehicles are no good,” the young officer complained. “The
enemy fire is fierce, and our infantry will have trouble keeping up.” Zhang was
relentless, telling the young officer that the attack had to be carried through
to the end nonetheless. A few moments later the tank company started its
assault. The young officer and his entire unit were wiped out in a hail of
shells, many of them fired from vessels anchored in the Huangpu River. “It
saddens me even today when I think about it,” Zhang wrote many years later in
his memoirs.

In this battle, modern tank warfare mixed with scenes more
reminiscent of earlier centuries. Wu Yujun, an officer of the Peace
Preservation Corps, was manning a position in the streets of Yangshupu on the
morning of August 18 when a detachment of Japanese cavalry attacked. The raid
was over almost instantly, and left numerous dead and injured Chinese in its
wake. The Japanese repeated the assault two more times. The third time, Wu
Yujun prepared an elaborate ambush, posting machine guns on both sides of the
street. As the riders galloped past, they and their horses were chopped to
pieces. Apart from four prisoners, all Japanese lost their lives. The 20th
century had met the 19th century on the battlefield, and won. It was a typical
incident, and yet in one respect also very atypical. In the streets of Shanghai
in August 1937, Chinese soldiers were far likelier to confront a
technologically superior enemy than the other way around.

Many of the Chinese units arriving in Shanghai had never
tasted battle before, and in the first crucial days of fighting, their lack of
experience proved costly. Fang Jing, a brigade commander of the 98th Division,
one of the units to arrive early in Shanghai, noticed how his soldiers often
set up inadequate fortifications that were no match for the artillery rolled
out by the Japanese. “Often, the positions they built were too weak and
couldn’t withstand the enemy’s 150mm howitzers,” he said. “The upshot was that
men and materiel were buried inside the positions they had built for
themselves.”

#

No one was surprised that the Japanese soldiers put up a
determined fight in Shanghai. Since their 1904–1905 triumph over the Russian
Empire, the legend of the “brave little Jap” had become firmly established in the
mind of the global public. So widespread was this view that if Japanese
soldiers did not fight to the death, it was a source of genuine surprise.
However, at moments of absolute frankness, the Japanese themselves could feel a
need to add nuance to foreign stereotypes about their countrymen’s behavior in
battle. “Our soldiers would prefer death to surrender,” a Japanese diplomat was
quoted as saying, “but the majority secretly hope that they will return
honorably to their own country, either wounded or unscathed.”

Foreign journalists noticed to their astonishment that there
seemed to be little in the Japanese code of honor that prevented them from
fleeing from a hopeless situation. One of them remembered seeing a number of
Japanese soldiers run back from a failed attack during the battle of Shanghai,
with the Chinese in hot pursuit. There were even rare instances of Japanese
soldiers raising the white flag. The same correspondent witnessed a party of
about 50 Japanese motorcyclists who had become bogged down in a rice paddy near
the city and were surrounded by Chinese. They surrendered immediately without
making any effort to resist.

These were minority cases. Most Japanese soldiers lived up to the high expectations placed on their shoulders at home and abroad. Physically, they tended to be short by western standards, but they were strong and capable of enduring immense hardship. This was as a result of rigorous training combined with draconian discipline, underpinned by the threat and liberal use of corporal punishment. The training was so efficient that a Japanese soldier entering the reserve never ceased to be a soldier again. In the early months of the war, American correspondent John Goette met a Japanese private in his late 30s who had just been called up from his civilian occupation as a dentist. “Hundreds of thousands like him had made a swift change from civilian life to the handling of a rifle on foreign soil,” he wrote. “Twenty years after his conscript training, this dentist was again a soldier.”

An added element in the training of Japanese soldiers was
indoctrination, which came in the form of repetition of the
virtues—self-sacrifice, obedience and loyalty to the emperor—which the soldiers
had learned since childhood. The result was mechanic obedience on the
battlefield. “Even though his officers appear to have an ardor which might be
called fanaticism,” a U.S. military handbook remarked later in the war, “the
private soldier is characterized more by blind and unquestioning subservience
to authority.” The downside was that soldiers and junior officers were not
encouraged to think independently or take the initiative themselves. They
expected to be issued detailed orders and would follow them slavishly. When the
situation changed in ways that had not been foreseen by their commanders—which
was the norm rather than the exception in battle—they were often left perplexed
and unable to act.

It could be argued that the Japanese military had few other
options than to train its soldiers in this way, since to a large extent it drew
its recruits from agricultural areas where there was limited access to
education. It was said that for every 100 men in a Japanese unit, 80 were farm
boys, ten were clerks, five factory workers, and five students. Nevertheless,
reading was a favorite pastime among Japanese soldiers. Military trains were
littered with books and magazines, mostly simple pulp fiction. When the trains
stopped at stations, even the locomotive’s engineer could be observed reading
behind the throttle. Some of them were prolific writers, too. A large number of
Japanese in the Shanghai area had brought diaries and wrote down their
impressions with great perception and eloquence. Some officers even composed
poems in the notoriously difficult classical style.

Many Japanese soldiers grew large beards while in China, but
in a twist that was not easy to understand for foreigners, they could sometimes
mix a fierce martial exterior with an almost feminine inner appreciation of
natural beauty. Trainloads of Japanese soldiers would flock to the windows to
admire a particularly striking sunset. It was not unusual to see a Japanese
soldier holding his rifle and bayonet in one hand, and a single white daisy in
the other. “Missionaries have found,” wrote U.S. correspondent Haldore Hanson,
“that when bloodstained Japanese soldiers break into their compounds during a
‘mopping up’ campaign, the easiest way to pacify them is to present each man
with a flower.”

Many Japanese soldiers also carried cameras into battle, and
as was the case with the Germans on the Eastern Front, their snapshots came to
constitute a comprehensive photographic record of their own war crimes.
Journalist John Powell remembered his revulsion when he saw a photo of two
Japanese soldiers standing next to the body of a Chinese woman they had just
raped. He had obtained the image from a Korean photo shop in Shanghai where it
had been handed in to be developed. “The soldiers apparently wanted the prints
to send to their friends at home in Japan,” he wrote. “Japanese soldiers
seemingly had no feelings whatsoever that their inhuman actions transgressed
the tenets of modern warfare or common everyday morals.”

#

On August 20, five Chinese aircraft were returning after
another fruitless attack on the Izumo, which was still moored in the middle of
the Huangpu, when they encountered two Japanese seaplanes over western Zhabei.
A Chinese plane broke formation, went into a steep dive and fired a short
machine gun salvo at one of the Japanese. It did not have a chance. It burst
into flames and plunged to the ground. The other Japanese plane disappeared in
the clouds. The entire encounter had only taken a few seconds. It was one of a
series of hits that the Chinese Air Force scored during a brief period in
August before it was completely subdued by its Japanese adversary.

Mitsubishi G3M medium bomber

In particular, it posed a threat to Japanese bombers, such as the highly flammable Mitsubishi G3M medium bomber aircraft assigned to striking targets in Shanghai and other cities in central China. Japan’s First Combined Air Group lost half of its medium attack planes in the first three days of the battle for Shanghai, some missing, some confirmed shot down and others heavily damaged. Their crews were particularly vulnerable, since they did not bring parachutes on their missions. From late August, the air group’s bombers were escorted by Type 95 Nakajima A4N fighter biplanes. This action amounted to a humiliating admission that China’s nascent air force was a force to be reckoned with.

Nakajima A4N

“In view of the pressing situation in the Shanghai area,”
said the First Combined Air Group’s commander, “our air raids reminded me of
that famous, costly assault against the 203-Meter Hill.” The battle for
203-Meter Hill had been one of the bloodiest episodes of the entire
Russo-Japanese War, claiming thousands of casualties on both sides. The Chinese
performance was significant enough that even foreign military observers paid
attention. British intelligence, in a report summarizing military events in the
middle of August, noted Chinese claims of having downed 32 Japanese aircraft.
“This statement appears well-founded,” the report’s writer added.

Even so, the Chinese airmen had been mostly untested and
only partly trained when the war started. Their inferiority, especially against
Japanese fighters, began to tell, and they gradually disappeared from the skies
over Shanghai. Their compatriots on the ground expressed frustration over the
lack of air cover. “We occasionally spotted two or three of our own airplanes, but
the moment they encountered enemy anti-aircraft fire, they disappeared,” said
Fang Jing, a regimental commander of the 98th Infantry Division. “They were no
use at all. After August 20, I never saw our planes again.”

That may have been hyperbole, but it was undeniable that the
evolving Japanese air superiority proved a major handicap for the Chinese. The
Chinese commanders soon realized that they had to carry out major troop
movements under the cover of darkness. Japan’s domination of the skies affected
everything the Chinese soldiers did and even determined when they could get
food. “We didn’t eat until at night,” said Fang Zhendong, a soldier of the 36th
Infantry Division. “That was the only time we could get anything. In the
daytime, it was impossible to transport provisions to the frontline.”

Without fighter protection the troops on the ground were
dangerously exposed. They had very little in the way of anti-aircraft weaponry,
mostly 20mm Solothurn guns produced in Switzerland. However, even these weapons
made next to no difference as they were primarily deployed against enemy
infantry. Also, the Chinese officers were reluctant to use their anti-aircraft
guns lest they reveal their positions to the Japanese aircraft. In late August
when Japanese Admiral Hasegawa was asked by a Reuters journalist visiting his
flagship if he was in control of the air, his reply was prompt: “Yes,” he said.
“I believe so.”