Battle of Shanghai: The Prequel to the Rape of Nanking

Battle of Shanghai:
The Prequel to the Rape of Nanking

Shanghai, known as the Pearl of the Orient, had always been an international center in China. But the city was left in near total destruction during the Sino-Japanese War. Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, the Japanese headed for its goal: the capital of China, Nanking. Shanghai was a key battleground before they were able to reach the capital of China, which brought on the “Stalingrad on the Yangtze.” As a leader of the Nationalist Government, Chiang Kai-Shek would lead the Kuomintang (“KMT”) Army into preparing the city to repel the oncoming smaller, yet technologically superior and more experienced Kwantung Army under the combat-experienced graduate of Japan’s elite war college, General Iwane Matsui.

Initially, the Imperial Japanese Army had estimated the battle to be over within three days due to their military superiority. However, the Japanese would be engaged in fighting for three months, one week, and six days against the KMT’s best-trained divisions in one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese would be forced into close combat urban warfare, alarmingly similar to the rat warfare between the Germans and Russians during the Battle of Stalingrad five years later, allowing many historians to name the Battle of Shanghai as “the Stalingrad of the Yangtze.” Special Japanese forces also used chemical weapons against the entrenched KMT soldiers. Only after the KMT military had run entirely out of ammunition, food, and water, were they forced to surrender or flee from the city which had been turned from a populated metropolitan center into a city of rubble and ashes.

The city of Shanghai also housed a large Jewish refugee and foreign expat population, which was comprised of mostly Americans and British civilians. During the battle, many lost their homes and were forcibly squeezed into small districts. Following the battle, many foreigners chose to stay and live among the Japanese as the Japanese also used their communities as military bases or headquarters. Due to the neutrality between Japan and the Western nations, the foreign communities did not face the same punishment as the Chinese civlians who were forced to remain in Shanghai after the defeat.

Since Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, there had been tension between the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Republic of China's Nationalist Revolutionary Army (NRA).

Japan hoped to use North China as a transport/communication base for their war against the Soviet Union, and hoped to spur economic development. For these purposes, Japan thought, the northern provinces needed freedom from Nationalist influence.

Marco Polo Bridge Incident

The tensions culminated in an armed standoff on July 8, 1837. Though China was able to hold the bridge, the NRA sustained tremendous losses, and it triggered full advance from Japan.

This conflict between the IJA and NRA is widely considered to be the first shots fired of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).

From there, Japanese internal command decided the military should make its way towards Nanjing, China's capital at the time.

Shanghai 上海, "Pearl of the Orient"

Along with this, they set their sights on capturing the international hub of Shanghai which would not only be politically advantageous but clear retaliation for the Anti-Japanese boycotts & discrimination in the city.

Bloody Saturday

by H.S. Wong, 28 Aug 1937

This photograph depicting a Chinese baby wailing amidst the ruins of the Shanghai Railway, which had been aerial-bombed by the Japanese, was widely published in the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The baby's mother lay dead nearby. In less than a month, 136 million people viewed this photo, including many Americans who had previously been oblivious to the war in East Asia. According to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential Photographs of All Time, "the infant’s pain represented the plight of China and the bloodlust of Japan, and the photo dubbed Bloody Saturday was transformed into one of the most powerful news pictures of all time. Its dissemination reveals the potent force of an image to sway official and public opinion. Wong’s picture led the U.S., Britain and France to formally protest the attack and helped shift Western sentiment in favor of wading into what would become the world’s second great war".

See a comparison of Shanghai before & after.

Photographs depict Nanjing Road in Shanghai, in 1930 and then on 14 August 1937.
The day after they stormed Shanghai, the Japanese dropped 6 bombs downtown.

Three months later in November, Shanghai fell. The IJA was free to proceed to Nanjing. For six weeks beginning on December 9, the Japanese would commit brutal mass murder and rape in what would come to be known as the Rape of Nanking or the Nanjing Massacre.

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