Chiang Kai-Shek’s Gamble in Shanghai, 1937
ANTHONY WAN
In
late 1937, a badly mauled Japanese army emerged victorious from the
war- ravaged streets of Shanghai. Although the Japanese military
leadership had confidently predicted the city would fall in three days,
its Chinese defenders had held off the Japanese invaders in a bitter
struggle lasting three months before finally being forced to retreat and
relinquish control of the city. The decision to hold Shanghai at such
costs, made by China’s wartime leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek,
can be regarded as a brave and dynamic show of defiance against a
foreign invader. However, while the Nationalist Army’s troops did indeed
put up a spirited defence, inflicting heavy losses to the enemy, their
value as Chiang’s most elite troops was squandered, with only marginal
benefit to China’s standing in the war. This was largely due to the high
rate of attrition suffered by these elite German-trained units, for,
despite their excellent training, they still lacked the amount of
firepower necessary to challenge the Japanese. The loss of so many of
these soldiers would, in turn, weaken Chiang’s position as leader of the
Chinese Army, actually a coalition of multiple factions, of which only a
portion were truly loyal to
him
and the Kuomintang. Together, these factors would force Chiang to adopt
a defensive posture for the remainder of the war. Indeed, Chiang Kai
-
Shek’s decision to attack the Japanese in Shanghai in 1937, while not
entirely without merit, was a poor use of military resources largely due
to its irreparable toll on the Nationalist Army and its weakening of
Chiang’s leadership over his coalition. Among other major consequences,
this would, in turn, negatively impact China’s, and particularly the
KMT’s ability to wage an offensive war against the Japanese.
The
importance of Shanghai and the surrounding hinterland to the Chinese
government was paramount. Indeed, Jiangsu and Zhejiang were the
provinces over which the government had the greatest degree of
territorial control, unlike the situation in North China.1
The
key cities of Nanjing (the capital), Hangzhou and, of course, Shanghai,
were all situated in these two provinces. In addition, much of China’s
industrial capacity was situated in the area around Shanghai.2
From
a strategic standpoint, Chiang’s German advisors had warned that the
loss of these two provinces would also allow the Japanese to effectively
cut China in two, and if the Nationalists were to retreat southwards,
they would be in a highly mountainous and relatively undeveloped region
from which they would be hard-pressed to mount any counteroffensive.3
Thus,
by extension, this meant that this was the region in which Chiang Kai-
Shek could best mount a stand against the Japanese and he gave strict
orders
for his troops to fight to the last man. Indeed, his determination to
hold the city is evidenced in his refusal to comply with his advisors’
pleas for him to sue for peace with the Japanese, dismissing some of
them as “old and impractical...[who,] after military defeat, [asked] for
appeasement.”4
The
region was simply too important to the survival of the KMT. More than
any other province in China, Chiang could not afford to lose Jiangsu and
Zhejiang
because of their vital importance to the KMT’s political
and economic power. If China were to make any stand against Japan, it
would understandably have to be here. The bulk of the Nationalist Army
divisions tasked with defending Shanghai were the famous German- trained
units, formed under the tutelage and supervision of military advisers
sent by Weimar and later Nazi Germany throughout the early 1930s.
Together with warlord armies hailing from Guangdong and Guangxi
provinces, among others, these elite units that were poured into
Shanghai from August to November of 1937
consisted of some 600,000
men, led by 35,000 officers trained at the prestigious Whampoa Military
Academy, among other noted military colleges. As such, these units
consisted of the most modern, best - equipped and highly trained
soldiers in the entire National Revolutionary Army, and were the only
units that had the capacity to fight a modern war. Chiang hoped that,
with these troops, he could wear down the Japanese in a war of
attrition, proclaiming, “the time must come when Japan’s military
strength will be completely exhausted, thus giving us ultimate victory.”5
However,
despite the fact that the Chinese force was numerically far superior to
Japan’s 200,000 troops, these elite units were still inadequately
equipped to face the Japanese on an equal footing in terms of firepower,
equipment and mobility.6
The
disparity between Japan’s heavy firepower and that of the Chinese Army
was indeed great. Key to the Japanese advantage was their near - total
air supremacy. Throughout the entire three - month battle, some 1,500
Japanese aircraft were able to lay down near- continuous fire down on
Chiang’s men with virtual impunity, and there was little that the
Chinese Air Force could do to challenge this with their 87 operational
aircraft.7
The
Japanese infantry elements were also well supported by armour and
artillery, and finally, in addition to having air cover, they could also
rely on the Imperial Navy for both naval gunfire support, and
transport. Having no real navy of their own, the Chinese could do little
to challenge the Japanese at sea. Indeed, it was the Imperial Navy that
provided the Japanese with the advantage of mobility, and their boldly
executed amphibious landing at Hangzhou Bay towards the end of the
fighting in Shanghai would decisively break the Chinese defences.8
Although
Chiang’s forces would still be able to inflict well over 40,000 enemy
casualties, a feat in itself, they would still be beaten back with far
greater losses of their ownby November 8. So complete was their defeat
that the retreat from Shanghai was a scene of total confusion and
disorganization; there was, by that time, little hope of regrouping.9
Thus,in
spite of performing commendably incombat, these elite units were routed
and virtually destroyed as an effective fighting force because they
were still at an inherent disadvantage, and the cost of losing so many
of them in a single battle was to have significant consequences for the
KMT and its place within the coalition of which it was a part.
Although
the Chinese Army was unified in name, it was actually an alliance of
sorts made up of several powerful warlord armies, the Chinese Communist
Party’s Red Army, and Kuomintang’s Nationalist Army, all under the
overall command of the Generalissimo himself. This consolidation of
power had been hard won. For example, the Red Army had been nearly
destroyed during Chiang’s lengthy campaigns against the Communists
during the 1920s and into the early 30s, removing it as a threat to his
power.10
Later alliances with the most powerful of China’s warlords also helped eliminate other obstacles to KMT dominance.
Granted,
Chiang’s army was far from the largest in the coalition by the time the
United Front was declared, but it was the most powerful. Indeed, out of
a total of 176 divisions loyal to the KMT government in 1937, Chiang
had direct control over 31, and of those, only 10 were the
German-trained units.11
This
had been enough to ensure his position as leader of the coalition. As
Colin Mackerras describes it, “Chiang’s army was not the only army in
China, but it was the strongest and most important.”12
Thus,
in early 1937, Chiang could be said to have cemented the KMT’s place as
the dominant political group in China. Because so much of Chiang’s
credibility as leader of the coalition hinged on his command of a well-
endowed army, the massive losses these troops sustained during the
fighting in Shanghai severely weakened this position.
It
should be noted that the Nationalist Army would still continue to grow
in numbers after 1937, and of course, the Nationalists would continue to
secure notable victories later on. But the Communist Eighth Route Army
and the warlord armies would also fight, and win, in many of the more
decisive engagements, undermining the KMT's credibility as the leading
faction; 13
the
damage to the KMT had indeed been great. Indeed,the nearly 250,000
casualties sustained by the German- trained units in Shanghai had
accounted for nearly 60% of Chiang’s best soldiers. Furthermore, some
20,000 of the 35,000 Whampoa-trained officers had also been lost in the
fighting, greatly weakening the calibre of Nationalist Army’s officer
corps, in whom so much of the future of the Army and KMT had been
invested. Historian Chang Jui-Te notes that this accounted for some 10%
of the total number of officers who had been trained at Whampoa (or the
other important military academies in China at the time), all lost in a
single action.14
More
importantly, throughout the entire time the Nationalist forces were
being slowly cut down in Shanghai, the Communist forces deployed
elsewhere in the country remained largely unscathed, offsetting the
power ratio between KMT and CCP forces.15
This
was precisely what Communist leader Mao Zedong had needed; indeed he
had, at the onset of war against Japan, predicted somewhat prophetically
that “all [of the CCP’s problems] would be resolved smoothly.”16
Granted,
the war was still at a relatively early stage, and the Communists
themselves would lose their share of soldiers during the war, but never
so many in such a decisively short space of time as the Nationalists did
at Shanghai. Thus, although the Kuomintang could recover from its
losses in Shanghai numerically, the reality was that the quality of the
soldiers lost there, in terms of their superior training and discipline,
was a permanent loss.
Finally,
Chiang’s initial powerbase had been significantly boosted by his
contacts in Shanghai’s financial community, and the fall of the city to
the Japanese had hurt his position in that the KMT had now lost its
major source of revenue and it would be some years before he could
expect any real help from foreign aid. Both politically and militarily,
the fighting in Shanghai had by the late 1930s made Chiang little more
than what Jonathan Spence aptly describes as the “presiding coordinator
of a loose federation of forces”, despite the apparently massive numbers
of Nationalist troops on paper.17
The
many perceived positive effects to come from the outcome of the battle
are also deceptive. For example, while it could be said that the
presence of the foreign concessions in Shanghai ensured that the battle
would draw much attention from the Western powers, a number of
historians have pointed out that such attention would have had little
real impact on the situation. This could have been predicted by past
experience: although the earlier battle of Shanghai in 1932 had drawn
much condemnation of Japan by the West, the latter had done little, if
anything, to dissuade the Japanese from continuing their campaign in
China.18
Indeed,
while it could be argued that Chiang and many in the KMT leadership
were hoping that the battle in Shanghai would help rally Western support
(especially because of the presence of the foreign concessions in the
city), they were well aware of the more likely possibility that the West
would probably do very little.19
In
fact, many of Chiang’s foreign advisors had repeatedly pointed out that
hoping for any effective foreign help at this stage of the war was
unrealistic.
20
For
example, both German advisor General Alexander von Falkenhausen and
Australian advisor, W.H Donald, had advised at different times that if
China was to go to war with Japan, she would largely be on her own for
as much as two years before they could even begin to expect any foreign
help.21
“Such views from highly placed advisors,” writes one historian, “[would] have disabused the government of any lingering
illusion of using the Shanghai campaign to trigger foreign intervention.”22
Perhaps
the best demonstration of the unwillingness of foreign powers to
intervene came in early December, when British and American gunboats
were attacked while evacuating their citizens from Nanjing. Even after
the American gunboat Panay was actually sunk by Japanese aircraft on the
12th, both governments quickly accepted Japanese apologies.
Although
American President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sympathetic to China’s
situation,isolationist sentiment was still too dominant in Congress for
him to really do very much;meanwhile, the British were preoccupied with
trying to keep another war from consuming Europe.23
In
effect, although Chiang certainly hoped foreign governments might help
put some measure of pressure on the Japanese, he was well aware of the
fact that he would not be able to solely rely on them to conveniently
solve the problem. For China, the moral support resulting from the
battle was, perhaps, better than nothing at all, but obviously not
enough to help China in any material sense.
Because
of the poor management of the KMT’s military resources, the disaster at
Shanghai would ultimately result in the government’s inability to
adequately protect the vital two provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu,
which would fall quickly under the Japanese advance over the next
several months. Indeed, the very disaster that the Shanghai action was
supposed to prevent had in fact transpired. The loss of crucial
industrial facilities in the Shanghai area, coupled with the loss of so
much of the Army’s offensive capabilities, largely meant that from 1937
onward, China was indeed mostly relegated to fighting a guerrilla war
waged from the backwater regions of the country.24
Of
course, the Chinese were able to transport some ofthese industries from
the region and into the (relatively) more secure parts of the country
the west, and the three months during which Chiang’s troops had the
Japanese bogged down in Shanghai no doubt allowed valuable time for this
undertaking to take place. Still, however, these areas of the country
were no substitute for the highly developed coastal regions lost in
1937. Furthermore, those western provinces were, as pointed out earlier,
areas of the country over which the KMT did not enjoy as much direct
control as they had in Zhejiang and Jiangsu. In effect, almost
everything that had arguably made Chiang the most powerful man in China
evaporated away with the defeat in Shanghai.
On
November 9th, Chiang finally ordered his troops to retreat, but they
had, in fact already been falling back for some time. Worse yet, their
retreat was not the orderly one for which they had prepared, as the
retreat was chaotic and disorganized. Although their performance in the
battle had demonstrated to the world that after nearly a century of
humiliating concessions and military defeats by foreign imperialist
powers, China was willing to fight and pay dearly for the defence of its
home soil, Chiang’s handling of the battle had had very severe
consequences. As has been shown, the decision to launch an offensive
against the Japanese in Shanghai was far more damaging to Chiang and the
KMT’s status in China than it was beneficial, and was carried out
rather recklessly. Firstly, the crack, German- trained troops of the
Nationalist Army, the best - trained and best - equipped Chiang (or any
Chinese general, for that matter) had at his disposal, were still
largely outgunned by their Japanese counterparts. With the sheer numbers
of men under his command, a more guerrilla - oriented campaign against
the better - armed Japanese would have perhaps been more effective.
Squandering so many of these valuable units in a single battle,
especially when the best of them were so few in number, was tactically
unsound. Of course, these units performed bravely and still inflicted
heavy losses on the Japanese, but in the end, the price they paid for
this was one from which the Nationalist Army would find it difficult to
recover. Chiang’s gamble would negatively alter the power dynamics of
his position within the coalition he had formed because he had
essentially lost the very ingredient that had made him the leader of
that coalition in the first place: a powerful army. Indeed, before
Shanghai, Chiang’s army had easily been the best in China whereas by the
time his troops had retreated from the city, Chiang’s position was far
more fragile. Granted, making a stand at Shanghai can still be looked on
as something of a necessary evil for the Nationalists, due to the
region’s strategic importance to the KMT, but this does not change the
fact that the resources with which Chiang had to defend it were gravely
misused. Thus, the Generalissimo’s gamble at Shanghai was perhaps made
with sensible concerns in mind, but it was poorly executed due to a
failure to properly recognize the inherent weaknesses of the Nationalist
Army in relation to their adversaries, and its far - reaching effects
were consequences that the KMT simply could not afford.----------------------
1
Hsi-Sheng Chi,Nationalist China at War: Military Defeatsand Political
Collapse, 1937-45 (Detroit, Michigan: University of Michigan Press,
1982), 45.
2 Ibid., 46.
3 Ibid., 46.
4 Chiang Kai-Shek, diary
entry. November 20, 1937 quoted in Jay Taylor,The Generalissimo:Chiang
Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China(Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2009), 151
5
Chiang Kai-Shek,Collected Wartime Messages of Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-Shek, 1937-1945,II vols. (New York, New York: John Day, 1945), 49,
as quoted in Jonathan
Fenby , Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the China He Lost (London: Simon & Schuster,2003), 310.
6 Chi, op cit, 37.
7 Taylor, op cit, 149.
8
Marvin Williamsen, “The Military Dimension, 1937-1941,” in China’s
Bitter Victory: The War With Japan, 1937-1945, ed. James C. Hsiung and
Steven I. Levine, 135-156 (Armonk, New York: East Gate, 1992), 143
9
Williamsen, op cit, 144
10 Edward L. Dreyer,China at War: 1901-1949(New York, New York: Longman, 1995),219.
11 Chi, op cit, 37.
12 Colin Mackerras, China in Transformation: 1900-1949(New York, New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998), 54
13
Dreyer, op cit, 219.
14
Jui-Te
Chang, “Nationalist Army Officers during the Sino-Japanese War,
1937-1945,” Modern Asian Studies(Cambridge University Press) 30, no. 4
(October 1996): 1033-1056, 1046.
15
Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern
China(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009), 148.
16
Mao
quoted in Zhang Guotao,The Rise of the Chinese Communist
Party(Lawrence, Kansas:University Press of Kansas, 1971), as quoted in
Taylor, 143
17
Jonathan Spence,The Search for Modern China, Second Edition (New York, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 434.
18
Wai
Chor So, “The Making of the Guomindang’s Japan Policy, 1932-1937: The
Roles of Chiang Kai-Shek and Wang Jingwei,” Modern China (Sage
Publications) 28, no. 2 (April 2002): 213-252, 243.
19
Although there was little in the way of practical help from foreign governments at this
time,
it is worth noting that China did garner much public support from these
countries. Key figures in the American administration, including
President Roosevelt himself, also sympathized with the Chinese plight.
It should also be pointed out that after the massacre at Nanjing in
December, the US government did impose trade embargoes on Japan, and
although this would compel the Japanese to (briefly) reconsider their
policy on China, it would of course still be another four years before
America (and their European allies) would enter the war.
20
Chi, op cit, 47
21
Ibid., 47.
22
Ibid., 47.
23
Dreyer, op cit, 220.
24
Hsi-Sheng
Chi, “The Military Dimension, 1942-1945,” in China’s Bitter Victory:
The War With Japan, 1937-1945, ed. James C. Hsiung and Steven I. Levine,
157-184 (Armonk, NewYork: East Gate, 1992), 179
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