Most Chinese take 7 Jul 1937, the day of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (卢沟桥事变) as the day when China officially went to war with Japan. Immediately after the incident, Chiang Kai-shek found himself out of an excuse to not confront the Japanese on Chinese soil. He decided to make his stand in Shanghai and this book is about that battle, known in the Chinese literature as 淞滬會戰.At 300 pages, this is a fairly short book by normal standards. The brisk and flowing style adopted by the author made the book an enjoyable read. This book is obviously based on good research and has the merit of showing many good archive pictures. On top of that, it also provides the answer to a question I have had for many years - why do Chinese soldiers that appeared in movies I saw as a child wear German helmets? Does it not make them the bad guys? This book is the only one I have come across that gives a good account of the close relationship between the Chinese government and the Germans, explaining the many German military advisers used by the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) in the 1930s.
The author, Peter Harmsen, is particularly good at articulating scenes of various types (although I suspect that this is helped by my own exposure to the pictures and movies I watched as a child). I would point to two examples, the first one was what went on in the Great World Amusement Centre, taking readers into the place itself, almost helping one to see what various vendors were doing. I thought I could hear the music coming out of the crackling grammaphone. The other, in contrast, was the gruesome fighting scenes of death and destruction. I confess again, that being exposed from young to pictures and movies made of that era has helped me to visualise (maybe inaccurately) what the author described, but that should not take anything away from his ability to attend to the smallest yet important details.
There are however lapses that reduces my enjoyment of the book. The prologue talked about the Xi-an Incident in which Chiang was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal as he was called, in a bid to force Chiang to come to terms with the Communists to fight the Japanese together. For such an important event, I wonder why the author did not mention it by name, and the greater ommission was Zhang Xueliang's name. Yet he would bother to interject his otherwise flowing narrative with stories that seem to come at the wrong time, or which are of no use to the reader. An example of such was the story on Dai Li (pg 145) which interrupted what was an exciting description of the brutal battle that was going on.
The author also made a strange comment on pg 64 about the tragedy of the Black Saturday. This was when the Chinese bombers sent to bomb the Japanese cruiser Izumo dropped their bombs in the most crowded parts of Shanghai instead, killing only Chinese civilians. The author said that 'the tragedy could have been prevented by Japan.' I cannot appreciate the thoughts behind what he said; was he trying to be sarcastic or ironic, or was he really putting the blame on the Japanese? I hope he had not said it.
That said, the perceptive author provided much for a reader to reflect upon.
The first of these was about the city itself. What was Shanghai really like in that era? If there was a 'limited war', I would say that this battle was the most 'limited' insofar as territory is concerned. With Japan's total restrain concerning the International Settlements, one got the surreal sense that the battle could be raging along one side of a fence maiming people indiscriminately, while on the other side, people, safe behind the fences of the International Settlements, watched on. Foreign reporters could still be staying in a five-star hotel that continued to operate as normal.
But 'limited' is also a misnomer in this battle, as with all others involving the Chinese. For Chinese commanders always seemed to believe that there were unlimited Chinese to die. Those frontal attacks against well-entrenched enemies in movies looked like propaganda, only that they were unfortunately accurate (pg 53). No one was called to account for the fiasco of Black Saturday. A captain, who claimed to be involved in it, even gave an interview to the press and tried to explained why it happened (pg 63).
I also could not help noticing that the one thing the that the Chinese Army seemed to consistently do successfully was to withdraw quietly at night from a salient they held in the day. The Japanese sometimes did not even know until days later. The one exception was battle for the Sihang Warehouse where some 425 Chinese soldiers took a last stand against the Japanese. This battle was described very well in the book.
Overall, this book is a good read. Although I have my complaints, these are probably due to my unfair expectations of it being more scholarly when it was written as a 'popular' history book. This book is recommended if for none other reason than there being very few English language works on the war in China during this era.
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